Full text of "Schelling-anniversary papers"

See other formats

NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/schellinganniverOOOOunse

SCHELLING

ANNIVERSARY

PAPERS

SCHELLING

ANNIVERSARY

PAPERS

HIS FORMER STUDENTS

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.
1923

*2>

V <3 X 3

Printed in U. S. A.

DEDICATED TO

FELIX E. SCHELLING

BY FORMER STUDENTS
ON HIS THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY AS
JOHN WELSH CENTENNIAL PROFESSOR Of]
HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

130748

PREFACE

The papers in this volume have been contributed by several of
Professor Schelling’s students in commemoration of his thirtieth
anniversary as John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and
English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania.

The bibliography of Professor Schelling’s published writings
was compiled by the editor.

The publication of the volume was made possible by contribu¬
tions from three sources : The College Alumni Society, the Class of
’81, and the Department of English. Its appearance in its present
form is due, however, in no small measure to the generous coopera¬
tion of its publishers. The editor wishes also to express his appre¬
ciation of the unfailing courtesy of Mr. Dana H. Ferrin of the
Educational Department of the Century Company. His sympathy
and understanding have removed many of the difficulties ordinarily
incident to publication.

It is a sad duty to have to record the premature death of one
of the contributors, Thomas Denis O’Bolger, of the English De¬
partment of the University, while the volume was printing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Arthur Hobson Quinn

Felix E. Schelling

Bibliography

The Romantic Defence of
Poetry .

The Chester Plays and
French Influence .

The Originality of William
Wycherley .

The Relation of Bacon’s
Essays to His Program
for the Advancement of
Learning .

The Picaro in the Spanish
Drama of the Sixteenth
Century ......

Attic Prose: Lipsius, Mon¬
taigne, Bacon ....

Centers of Interest in
Drama, Dramatic Tension,
and Types of Dramatic
“Conflict” .

The Marginalia of S. T. C.

Dickens, Daznd Copperdeld,
and Thomas Holcroft .

John Brinsley and His Edu¬
cational Treatises .

Raymond Macdonald Alden .
Albert C. Baugh . . . .

George B. Churchill .

• • r .

Ronald S. Crane . . . .

J. P. Wickersham Crawford
Morris IV. Croll . . . .

Allison Gaw .

John Louis Haney

Paul C. Kitchen ....

George Wm. McClelland .

PAGE

107

117

151

173

181

189

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Ballad Notes Taken in
Bucks County, Pennsyl¬
vania .

The Artist and His Tech¬
nique .

Dr. Furness’s Method in
Editing the New Variorum

Thomas Campbell and Ger¬
many .

Money Lending and Money¬
lenders in England dur¬
ing the i6th and 17TH
Centuries .

The Poetry of Viktor Ryd¬
berg .

Act Four of The Merchant of
Venice on the Stage

The Place of the Book of
Luke in Literature

The Art of Joseph Conrad .

John C. Mendenhall . ■ *213

T. D. O’Bolger . . . .221

Daniel E. Owen .... 227
Daniel B. Shumway . . . 233

Arthur B. Stonex .... 263

Charles Wharton Stork . . 287

Clarence Stratton . . . 301

W. O. Sypherd . . . .311

Cornelius Weygandt . . .319

SCHELLING

ANNIVERSARY

PAPERS

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY

PAPERS

FELIX E. SCHELLING

Arthur Hobson Quinn
Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

HE account of the career of a great teacher and scholar is not

merely a record of events. If it is to be of service as an

inspiration to those who come after him it must reveal a
philosophy of life, and to those who know Felix Schelling, such a
guiding principle of conduct shines clearly through the years that
have brought him to the anniversary which this volume celebrates.
The record of his achievements will indicate his tireless industry;
their impression upon the world of scholarship will reveal his ability
as an investigator and a creator. But there are two qualities that
have characterized the man which show more definitely in his human
relations. The first, by which he has won the respect of those with
whom he agreed and those with whom he differed, is — courage.
The second, which has endeared him to his more intimate friends
and colleagues, has been that consideration for the rights of others
which enabled him to develop from its beginning a university de¬
partment of instruction, unified, loyal and yet highly individual in
its elements, which will remain his most significant creation.

Before the story of his University career begins, however, a few
words must establish the influences of his earlier life.

Felix E. Schelling’s father, Felix Schelling, Senior, was born in
Canton St. Gallen, Switzerland, and was educated to follow an uncle
in the profession of medicine. The family, identified as the same
as that of the philosopher, was originally a Dutch one, the branch in
which we are interested coming from Holland to Switzerland in the

4 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

late sixteenth century. The father, mentioned above, because of
political reasons gave up his medical ambitions and came to Louis¬
ville, Kentucky, in 1849, where he became engaged in editing, and
in teaching music and languages. Here he met and married, Rose,
daughter of George Busby White of Cambridge, England. This
family had for generations resided in Cambridge, — a line of civic
officers and barristers. Two other daughters of this family married
and settled in Louisville, one to a son of Bishop Griswold, the other
to a Mr. Morton of the firm of Morton and Griswold, publishers,
then as now in Louisville. On September 13, 1858, while his parents
were yet living in Kentucky, Felix Schelling was born and christened
by the venerable Bishop White.

After passing some years in the east and in Europe, the family
settled in St. Louis, where Felix Schelling, Senior, became director
of the St. Louis Conservatory of Music. Young Felix was not
robust during these years; so his education progressed by means of
private lessons, and his devoted mother’s constant reading and help.
Several summers were passed roaming the prairies on a pony and
busying himself making a collection of beetles, butterflies and other
insects. At the age of fourteen he gave his first lecture, its subject —
“Harmless and Noxious Insects.” The written words of this first
lecture still exist. At the age of fifteen Felix was sent to New York
to receive a thorough musical training under that fine old musician,
Mr. Henry C. Timm, president of the New York Philharmonic
Society. Felix was at this time not without a fair knowledge of
music for he had played for Rubenstein at the age of thirteen.
Living several years in the home of Mr. Timm, Felix’s education
progressed not only in music but also in modern languages. About
this time the desire for a larger development than was possible to a
merely musical profession, began to possess him, culminating in his
breaking away from the narrowing lines designed for him and in his
admission to college. He entered the course in Arts at the Uni¬
versity of Pennsylvania in the sophomore class, receiving the degree
of Bachelor of Arts in 1881.

He took an active part in undergraduate affairs, especially in the
musical organizations, was class poet, and a member of the Philo-
mathean Society and of Phi Kappa Psi. AVhen the Pennsylvania
Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established in 1892, he be¬
came one of the organizing members. He took the degree of LL.B.

FELIX E. SCHELLING

from the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1883,
joined the Sharswood Law Club and was selected to deliver the Law
Oration at Commencement. The summer of 1881 was spent in
England, France, Switzerland, and Germany.

In March 1886, Mr. Schelling married Miss Caroline Derby¬
shire, daughter of James Alexander Derbyshire, of a Quaker family
of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1890 their first child Dorothea
Derbyshire Schelling, was born. She is now the wife of Dr. Joseph
Seronde, Professor of Romanic Languages at Yale University.
Felix Schelling, Jr. was born in 1895, and is now a promising artist.
He is the seventh of the name in direct descent.

Until 1886 Mr. Schelling practised law, but his interest remained
constant in academic fields. The graduate work was not then fully
organized at the University but he pursued such courses as were
offered in Sanscrit and Comparative Philology under Professor Mor¬
ton W. Easton and received the degree of Master of Arts in 1885.
Then in 1886 came his appointment as Instructor in English.

When Mr. Schelling joined the teaching staff of the College in
1886 he found the Department of English in a somewhat nebulous
state. English had been taught at Pennsylvania since William Smith,
the first Provost, joined its staff in 1754, and the great teaching and
inspiration of Henry Reed, the friend of Wordsworth, was still a
tradition, but while the courses in Rhetoric were in the capable hands
of Professor McElroy there was little organization of the work in
literature. In 1888 Mr. Schelling’s opportunity came when he was
asked by Provost William Pepper to propose a plan by which the
scope of the English courses should be broadened and the teaching
of the subject be made more effective.

His scheme of organization defined the basic principles upon
which the Department of English was for the first time really or¬
ganized. He proposed the establishment of courses in English
Composition, English Language and English Literature, outlining
their distinctions but insisting upon their inter-relations. He in¬
sisted, too, upon the essential principle of the integrity of the De¬
partment of English which must retain direction and control of all
instruction in that subject given at the University. He advocated
the abolition of the term “rhetoric,” and an increase in practical
writing with a requirement of a certain amount of it for all students,
thus early taking his stand against the theory that competence in

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

writing can be secured merely by the observation of literary master¬
pieces. An idea of the indefiniteness concerning the scope of Eng¬
lish teaching at that time may be gleaned from the fact that Mr.
Schelling had to insist that Old English (Anglo-Saxon) should
be taught under the supervision of the teachers of English and not,
like Icelandic and Gothic, by the professor of German.

The largeness of Mr. Schelling’s view of the situation may be
estimated by his further proposal that the Trustees secure the best
available English scholar in the country to head this Department,
and he relieved them of any responsibility toward himself, modestly
sinking his own claims for what he considered the best interests
of the University. Provost Pepper, who was a good judge of men,
saw in the young instructor who made these proposals, the right
man to carry them out, and appointed Mr. Schelling Assistant Pro¬
fessor of English Literature in the same year, 1888. The illness
and death of Professor McElroy soon left to him the entire re¬
sponsibility for the conduct of the Department. For advice, Pro¬
fessor Schelling turned especially to two persons. He consulted
first Dr. Horace Howard Furness, who had placed at his friend’s
disposal his Shakespeare library, and who even volunteered his help
in the conduct of courses described below. He next sought the
counsel of the Reverend Stopford Brooke, and at the latter’s home
in London, talked over his plans. Mr. Schelling has told me how
distinctly he remembers the last time he saw that kindly, animated
face. Brooke put his broad hand on his visitor’s shoulder, and with
a sigh and a smile, said: “My boy, it’s a fine opportunity this of
yours : I wish I had your chance.”

The plan which Professor Schelling evolved, with the thought¬
ful and mature counsel of these two scholars, was in brief :

That writing (composition) should be demanded of all stu¬
dents, as much of it as the other claims on their time should make
possible.

That formal rhetoric, including all warnings against errors and
corrections of hypothetical mistakes, should be abolished.

That the work in writing should be as informal and as interest¬
ing — by way of subject — as possible and that correction should be
of actual mistakes made.

That, as to the courses in literature, there should be an attempt
to approach the subject from the more familiar to the less familiar.

FELIX E. SCHELLING 7

That therefore modern writers should come earliest, prose writers
before poets.

Out of this list two courses for the sophomore year were
evolved : a course in the reading and understanding of six modern
novels (not a course in the history of fiction : this was the first course
in the Novel for undergraduates in America, having been given in
the session of 1889-1890) ; and secondly a course in the Essayists,
also confined to a very few names, Macaulay, Carlyle, etc. The
idea of these courses was not information, but the presentation to
the student of good literature and the explanation of its meaning.
In Junior year two courses followed in the history of literature:
first, the Eighteenth Century as more familiar; second, the Eliza¬
bethan Age as more remote, and each was treated by authors with
reading in class and out. Finally, as to senior year, there followed
a course on the Nineteenth Century Poets and a course in the drama
of Elizabeth’s day.

A feature of all this work was the written report of the stu¬
dent, its incessant reading and correction by the teacher. Another
was the voluntary “seminary” as it was Teutonically called, in which,
in the upper classes, the privilege of meeting at the professor’s
home of an evening to read and discuss authors over and above those
in the course was extended to the twelve best men. There was
eager acceptance of this although no credits were given for the work.

The work in the English Language was brought under the
charge of the late Morton W. Easton, who in 1892 became Professor
of English and Comparative Philology while Professor Schelling
became John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and English
Literature. While this curriculum has naturally been widened and
enriched during the progress of years, it is significant that the indi¬
vidual courses that were first proposed are still offered at Pennsyl¬
vania and happily still given by their founder.

It was not only in the establishment of courses however that
Professor Schelling laid the foundation of the Department of Eng¬
lish. As time went on and the College grew, new instructors came,
of his selection. In a day when it was the custom in American
college education for the head of a department to demand of his
assistants rigid compliance with his own theories and practices of
teaching, Professor Schelling pursued a different course. Each
new man was given the greatest liberty of action, was spurred on

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

to develop his own individuality, and was encouraged to make sug¬
gestions concerning the conduct of the department. That depart¬
ment now contains fifty members and meets annually se\eral thou¬
sand students. That its homogeneity and esprit dc corps are still
matters of comment is due perhaps largely to the character of its
founder.

During his career at Pennsylvania, Professor Schelling has taken
an active part in the development of the College. So productive a
scholar might have with some reason avoided the demands of com¬
mittee work, yet so devoted an alumnus could not do so. To recount
all the activities with which he has thus been connected would be
to write a volume upon the growth of new departments, the en¬
largement of the University’s sphere of usefulness, and in some
cases, the explosion of educational bubbles of great apparent circum¬
ference but of little actual permanence. In these matters, Professor
Schelling has been neither a Tory nor a Radical. He has stood for
the preservation of the best that the traditional culture has to give,
but he has recognized also that the world moves. He was one of
the leaders in the movement that resulted in the New Curriculum
of the Course in Arts in 1914, and he was one of the Committee
of the College Faculty which in 1920 represented the Faculty’s be¬
lief that the University of Pennsylvania should continue and develop
to the utmost its policy of service to the State whose name it bears.
It is not only his long term of service but more especially the gen¬
eral trust in his sincerity, his judgment and his courage, that have
made him in a special sense the representative of the Faculty of
the College.

Professor Schelling’s relation to his students has been a constant
refutation of the mistaken idea, so often circulated nowadays, that
the professor in a large urban university is necessarily remote from
that personal influence which is the life of teaching. I know that
to the class that entered the College in the fall of 1890 he was always
a personal friend and the tradition then established has been con¬
stant. In 1904 when the graduating class dedicated the annual pub¬
lication, the “Record,” to him, the inscription was significant:

If anything in this book is worthy of Pennsylvania, or of those who
have contributed to her welfare— it is dedicated with all affection and
loyalty to Felix E. Schelling.

FELIX E. SCHELLING

The impulse to scholarship with which he inspired his graduate
students is reflected so well in this volume that it hardly needs fur¬
ther emphasis. The mingled strains of Dutch and English ancestry
probably account for the fact that while his students were ever im¬
pressed with the necessity of accuracy, they also never were al¬
lowed to lose that sense of proportion in scholarship to which a
purely Germanic training is apt to lead.

It has been this keen sense of proportion, too, which, notwith¬
standing the stern responsibilities of teaching, the conduct of a
growing department, and the constant interruptions of local de¬
mands upon his time, has enabled Professor Schelling to make his
significant contribution to printed scholarship. He started the Uni¬
versity series of Monographs in Literature with his Poetic and
Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth in 1891. In 1892 his edi¬
tion of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries drew from Dr. Horace Howard
Furness the epigram: “At last rare Ben Jonson has been well
done.” His monograph on The Life and Writings of George Gas¬
coigne came next in 1893, and his excellent judgment in separating
the permanent from the passing was illustrated in his Book of
Elizabethan Lyrics (1896) and his Book of Seventeenth Century
Lyrics (1899). In 1898 he presented in “Ben Jonson and the Classi¬
cal School,” a brilliant study of the origins and sources of the
Age of Pope. For many years all other work was but a by-product
to his study of the Elizabethan dramatists, and in 1902 he published
his preliminary account of one phase of the subject in The English
Chronicle Play. It was a notice to the world of scholarship that
the best manner of treating a literary form was through the types
into which it ran rather than through the men who had produced its
examples. In 1904 came his charming essays, The Queen’s
Progress and other Elizabethan Sketches, in which he reflected the
spirit of the age which he has so thoroughly made his own. The
crowning work of his life so far, appeared in 1908, his Elizabethan
Drama, 1558-1642, a History of the Drama in England from the
Accession of Queen Elizabeth to the Closing of the Theaters, to
which is prefixed a Resume of the Earlier Drama from its
Beginnings. These two volumes have taken their place as the defin¬
itive work on the subject.

Next came his English Literature During the Lifetime of Shake¬
speare, in 1910; and in 1913 his volume on The English Lyric, the

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

field in which, next to the drama, his keenest interest lay. In some
respects this book pleases his friends the most. The charm of the
style reflects the Schelling they know in actual life. If the History
of the Elizabethan Drama presents his most solid achievement as an
historian of literature, The English Lyric reveals him as the dis¬
criminating critic, the master of the illuminating generalization
and the distinguished phrase.

In 1914 Professor Schelling was asked by Mr. Ernest Rhys to
write in a series under his direction a History of English Drama in
which he dealt with the entire field. The war and the many conse¬
quent activities which for all men of scholarship were naturally in¬
terruptions to their normal routine, turned Professor Schelling
towards an earlier form of expression. From the very beginning of
the conflict in 1914, he took a firm stand on the side of civilization,
and his resentment at the conduct of Germany found vent in literary
form in his war verses which were collected and published under
the title of Thor and Other War Verses in 1918.

One cannot write in the past tense concerning Professor
Schelling’s productions in scholarship. At present he is writing
from a new point of view an account of the Elizabethan Drama.

Among the many articles, a complete list of which will be found
in the Bibliography, may be mentioned the chapter on the Restora¬
tion Drama in the Cambridge History of English Literature, the
Introduction to Ben Jonson’s Plays in the Everyman edition, and
the masterly review of the fifth and sixth volumes of the Cam¬
bridge History for the Modern Language Reznew.

Among the many addresses which Professor Schelling has
delivered on public occasions on this side of the Atlantic, perhaps
those which will be the longest remembered by his audiences were his
words at the meeting at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in
1912 in memory of Horace Howard Furness, the Phi Beta Kappa
Oration at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902, and his Com¬
mencement Address in 1915- There was a singular appropriateness
in the choice of Professor Schelling to describe the life work of
the great Shakespearean scholar whose mantle had descended upon
his own shoulders. Often when a great scholar dies, it seems as
though no successor could be found. It is a rare chance that in
his own city and in the University with which he was so long
associated as a Trustee, there should be already a man who could

FELIX E. SCHELLING n

justifiably be assigned the position of leadership in the field Dr.
Furness left vacant.

The Phi Beta Kappa address was upon “Humanities Gone and
to Come.” It was a bugle call to those who believe in preserving
the permanent values in education. One sentence of the address,
“Depend upon it, the sword is best whetted upon that which it is
intended never to cut,” remains in the memory of many an auditor.
This address has been re-printed in Phi Beta Kappa Addresses.

The international scope of Professor Schelling’s reputation has
made him an appropriate choice to represent the University or the
Nation on many occasions abroad. In 1900 he attended in the first
capacity the four hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the
University of Glasgow. In 1914 he was chosen, as the one Amer¬
ican to be so honored, an Honorary Member of the Deutsche Shake-
speare-Gesellschaft, and attended the celebration at Weimar, April
21-24, °f the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of that society.
Among the six other foreigners who received a similar distinction
were Lord Haldane for England, and M. Jusserand for France, and
Professor Schelling became by a curious fate, the bearer of the
society’s diploma to M. Jusserand, who had been unable to be
present. In July, 1921 he represented the University at the
re-laying of the cornerstone of the library of the University of
Louvain.

Although he has been in continuous service since 1886, Profes¬
sor Schelling has not confined his teaching entirely to Pennsylvania.
In 1906-1907 he was invited to give courses in “Shakespeare” and
in “The Drama from Jonson to the closing of the Theaters” at
Johns Hopkins University. He has lectured at the Summer Ses¬
sion of the University of Chicago, conducted graduate work at
New York University, and was the Clyde Fitch Lecturer in Drama
at Amherst College.

There has never been anything of the recluse about Felix Schel¬
ling. Movements of the right kind, professional, national, or local,
have had his constant interest and support. For many years he
has been an active member of the Modern Language Association
of America and was its President in 1912. Other organizations of
which he has been President are the Society of the Alumni of the
University of Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Club of
Philadelphia.

12 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Recognition of his achievements in literature and scholarship
has come in the form of elections to membership in the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society,
and to the office of Senator of Phi Beta Kappa. From his own
University such recognition has been expressed by the Trustees’ ac¬
tion in awarding him the honorary degrees of Litt.D. in 1903 and
of LL.D. in 1909.

Happily, the record is still incomplete. The world of scholar¬
ship may still hope for productions from Felix Schelling. His
friends and colleagues may still look forward with confidence to
years in which his genial presence and his stimulating influence may
be theirs. The Department of English, no matter what its form
of organization may become, will still recognize him as its spiritual
head, and will not lose the impress he has given it. The College
and the University of Pennsylvania may expect to retain his wisdom
and his courage in their service. When that service terminates,
it will be but to mark the point at which will begin another of those
great traditions, to be carried on in the minds and hearts of his
students, which have enriched the history of Pennsylvania and
of the nation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF THE WRITINGS OF FELIX E. SCHELLING FROM 1889 TO I923.

1889

1890

Review: Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, i6!i2-l\d.
The American, XVII (1889), 218-19.

E. Gosse: A History of Eighteenth Century Literature. The
American, XVII (1889), 361-62.

“A Word on English Literature in America,” Poet-Lore I (1880)
210-13.

Review: J. G. R. McElroy: The Structure of English Prose. The
American, XIX (1889), 12.

“The Scope of English Literature in Education,” Modern Language
Notes, IV (1889), 487-91. *

^VFnS^ent*?v- ¥#*■” Academy, A Journal of Secondary
Education, IV (1889), 495-500.

Two Essays on Robert Browning: I. Robert Browning and the Poetry
of the Future; II. Robert Browning and the Arabesque in Art
Privately printed, 1890.

R'YAt"LAV Uuntm- Mod,n

‘‘Antipodean Verse,” Atlantic Monthly, LXV (1890), 281-83.

pen seP ULos t^Work:, ‘The English Poete,' ” Modern Language Notes,

FELIX E. SCHELLING 13

Review: A. C. Swinburne: A Study of Ben Jonson. Modern Language
Notes, V (1890), 366-70.

A. H. Welsh: A Digest of English and American Literature.
The American, XXI (1890), 74.

“The Inventor of the English Hexameter,” Modern Language Notes,
V (1890), 423-27-

Review : “An Elizabethan Classic” : Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of
Poesy, ed. A. S. Cook. Modern Language Notes, V (1890), 483-87.

1891 Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elisabeth, Publications of

the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Philology, Literature,
and Archaeology, Vol. I, No. 1, 1890.

Review: J. J. Jusserand: The English Novel in the Time of Shake¬
speare. Modem Language Notes, VI (1891), 222-26.

“University Extension in Its Practical Workings,” Book News, IX
(1891), 356-58.

1892 Ben Jonson: Timber or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, ed.

with Intro, and Notes, Boston, 1892.

1893 “How Can the Highest Educational Efficiency Be Secured for English

in American Colleges?” The University Magazine, Jan., 1893,
pp. 5-io.

The Life and Writings of George Gascoigne, with Three Poems here¬
tofore not Reprinted. Publications of the University of Pennsyl¬
vania, Series in Philology, Literature, and Archaeology, Vol. II,
No. 4 [1893]-

“In the Tribunal of Literary Criticism: Bacon vs. Shakespeare. Part
II, Closing Arguments for the Defence,” Arena, VII (1893),
753-59-

1894 "English at the University of Pennsylvania,” Dial, XVII (1894),

146-47. Reprinted in W. M. Payne, English in American Univer¬
sities, Boston, 1895, pp. 130-34.

1895 A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, selected and edited with an Introduction,

Boston [1895].

1896 “Poems of Shirley attributed to Carew and Goffe,” Modern Language

Notes, XI (1896), 273-77.

1898 “Studies in the Evolution of Dramatic Species from the Beginnings of

the English Drama to the Year 1660,” University of Pennsylvania
Bulletin, Jan. 1898.

Review: D. Hanney: The Later Renaissance. The Citizen, IV (1898),
85-87.

“Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport,” D. H. Madden: The
Diary of Master William Silence. The Citizen, V (1898), 277-80.
“Ben Jonson and the Classical School,” Publications of the Modem
Language Association of America, XIII (1898), 221-49. Reprinted,
Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Philology,
Literature, and Archaeology, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1898.

1899 “The Poetry and Satire of Andrew Marvell,” City and State, VI

(1899), 11.

A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, selected and edited with an
Introduction, Boston [1899].

“The Countess of Pembroke Epitaph,” N . Y. Evening Post, May 20,

1899-

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

"Notes on Lyrical Poetry,” Modern Language Notes, XIV (1899),

220-28.

1900 “Valteger ‘Henges’ and The Mayor of Queenborough,” Modern Lan¬

guage Notes, XV (1900), 269-72.

“Tom Tyler and His Wife,” Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, XV (1900), 253-89.

1901 “Professor Schelling’s Report of the Glasgow Anniversary,” Alumni

1902 “Dr. Horace Howard Furness and the Variorum Shakespeare,” Ibid.,

VI (1902), 224-34.

“The Elizabethan Theatre,” Lippincott’s Magazine, LXIX (1902),

309-23-

Humanities Gone and to Come, an address read before the Phi Beta
Kappa Society, Delta Chapter of Pennsylvania, University of
Pennsylvania, June 18, 1902, Published by the Society. Reprinted
in The Evanston Press, June 11, 1910, p. 6; Classical Weekly, VII
(1913-14), 179-84; and elsewhere. Included in Representative Phi
Beta Kappa Orations, ed. C. S. Northrup, W. C. Lane, and J. C.
Schwab, Boston, 1915, pp. 286-97.

The English Chronicle Play: A Study in the Popular Historical Lit¬
erature Environing Shakespeare, New York and London, 1902.

1903 “In Carlyle’s Country,” Alumni Register (University of Pennsylvania),

VII (1903), 309-13.

The Merchant of l enice, edited for The Gateway Series, New York

[1903].

1904 The Queens Progress and Other Elizabethan Sketches, Boston and

New York, 1904; London, n.d.

“Some Features of the Supernatural as represented in Plays of the
Reigns of Elizabeth and James,” Modern Philology, I (1903), 31-47.
Tabular List of English Plays acted at Oxford and Cambridge between
1564 and 1642 [Privately printed by the authorl. March. 100a.

Old English Sacred Drama,” Lippincott’s Magazine. LXXIV finn^Y

FELIX E. SCHELLING

Review: “The Life and Art of George Herbert’’: The English Works
of George Herbert, ed. G. H. Palmer. The Sunday School Times,
XLVIII (1906), 222-3.

“Preparation in English for Admission to the College,” Pennsylvania
School Journal, LV (1906), 90-93.

1907 “Quartos of Old English Plays in the Library [of the University of

Pennsylvania],” Alumni Register (University of Pennsylvania), XI
(1907), 206-10. [Cf. entry under 1904, to which this is a
supplement.]

1908 Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642: A History of the Drama in England

from the Accession of Queen Elizabeth to the Closing of the
Theaters, to which is prefixed a Resume of the Earlier Drama from
its Beginnings, 2 vols., Boston, 1908 ; London, 1908. Second edition,
Boston [ 191 x ] .

1909 Review: V. E. Albright: The Shakespearean Stage. Book News

Monthly, XXVIII (1909), 287-88.

1910 “Dr. Horace Howard Furness Honored,” Old Penn, VIII (1910), 356.
English Literature During the Lifetime of Shakespeare, New York,

1910.

“The Elizabethan Playhouse,” Proceedings of the Numismatic and
Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, XXV (1910), 143-55, with
eight plates.

“A Letter on the Honor System,” The Pennsylvanian, Feb. 3, 1910.
“A.ddress at the Opening of the Graduate School” : [The Teacher and
the Investigator],” Old Penn, IX (1910), 72-76.

Introduction to The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (Everyman’s
Library), 2 vols., London and New York [1910].

1911 “William Lilly and The Alchemist,” Modem Language Notes, XXVI

(1911), 62-63.

“The Representation of Shakespeare” [Contribution to a Symposium],
New Age, (1911), 559-

Review: The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. V. Mod¬
ern Language Review, VI (1911), 406-12.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, edited for English Readings for Schools, New
York [1911].

1912 Review : The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VI.

Modern language Review, VII (1912), 105-10.

Contribution to a Symposium on Engineering English, Proceedings of
the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, XIX
(19x2), 72-75.

“The Honor System,” Editorial in Alumni Register (University of
Pennsylvania), XIV (1912), 135-36.

Masterpieces of the English Drama (General Editor), New York,

I9I2ff.

Beaumont and Fletcher [Four Plays of], edited for Masterpieces of the
English Drama, New York [1912].

Review: C. F. Tucker Brooke: The Tudor Drama. Yale Review, n.s. I
(1911-13), 704-8.

“Horace Howard Furness,” The Nation, XCV (1912), 165-67.

“The Restoration Drama, I,” Chapter V of The Cambridge History of
English Literature, Vol. VIII, Cambridge and New York, 1912.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

1913 “A Note on Some Recent Applications of Demi-Science to Shake¬
speare,'' abstract in Publications of the Modern Language Associa¬
tion of America, XXVIII (1913), xv-xvi. (Read at the M.L.A.
meeting in Philadelphia, Dec. 28, 1912.)

“The Spirit of a University,’’ Editorial in Alumni Register (University
of Pennsylvania), XV (1913), 243-45.

Review: C. Wevgandt : Irish Plays and Playwrights. Old Penn, XI
(1912-13), 980-81.

“Professor Penniman’s New Book,” Poetaster by Ben Jonson
and Satiromastix by Thomas Dekker, ed. J. H. Penniman. Old
Penn, XI (1912-13), 1109-10.

“Address" in Memory of Horace Howard Furness, Philadelphia,
Jan. 17, 1913, Old Penn, XI (1912-13), 581-85.

Review: John Masefield : The Tragedy of Nan. Everyman (London),
Sept., 1913, p. 718.

The English Lyric (Types of English Literature), Boston, 1913.

1914 “From Mercury to Morgan" (news letter from Rome), Red and Blue,
XXVI (1913-14), 311-13.

English Drama (Channels of English Literature), London and New
York, 1914.

1915 “The American Professor,” President's Address before the Modern
Language Association of America, meeting at Columbia University,
Dec. 29, 1914, Publications of the Modern Language Association
of America, XXX (1915), liv-lxxiii.

“Some Recent Discoveries concerning Shakespeare,” University of
Pennsylvania Lectures by Members of the Faculty II (1914-15)
243-61.

“The Elizabethan Club [at Yale],” Red and Blue, XXVII (1015)
305-08. v y oz,

Academic Rights and Privileges,” A Commencement Address delivered
at the University of Pennsylvania, June 16, 1915, Old Penn, XIII
W4-I5), 1221-24; Alumni Register (University of Pennsylvania)
XVII (1914-15), 735-42.

1916 “Shakespeare Tercentenary,” Address before the Arts Association of

the University of Pennsylvania, Feb. 16, 1916, Old Penn XIV
(1915-16), 716-20.

Recent Books on Shakespeare,” N. Y. Evening Post Literary Review
April 22, 1916, pp. 12-13. ’

“The Common Folk of Shakespeare," A Book of Homage to Shake¬
speare edited by Israel Gollancz, Oxford, 1916, pp. 364-72 Also

( 191*6 f 14yi SoCeedlngS ° the Ameruan Philosophical Society, LV

1917 Review: R. M Alden : Alfred Tennyson: How to Know Him. Alumni

1918 Revfcw: M . Jastrow: The War and the Bagdad Railway. Public

Ledger (Philadelphia), Jan. 20, 1918. y

“ThdOn0hrran’’ w S°lLTn T The Even™9 Public Ledger (Phila¬
delphia) every Wednesday from Feb. 27, 1918 to Sent 2<t to 8
thereafter every Thursday to Sept. 30, 1920 P 5’ 9 8’

Thor and Some Other War Rhymes. Privately printed [Phila.J 1918

From Under the Knife and “A Thought Obvious ” r t \ ^
Verse, V (1918), 61-62. g UDvious, Contemporary

FELIX E. SCHELLING 17

Review : Lustra of Ezra Pound, uhth Earlier Poems. Alumni Register
(University of Pennsylvania), XX (1917-18), 602-04.

1920 Enrico W. Longfellow, Poeta-Dantista. . . . (Americani Illustri: Rac-

colta Biografica diretta de H. Nelson Gay, No. 9), Firenze, n.d.
Reviews in The Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia), Saturdays
from Oct. 9, 1920 to June 11, 1921. Reprinted under title Appraise¬
ments and Asperities; see below.

1921 “The Seedpod of Shakespeare Criticism,” University of Pennsylvania

Lectures by Members of the Faculty, VII (1921), 141-57.

“Some Values Educational and Other.” Phi Beta Kappa Oration de¬
livered at Franklin and Marshall College, June 7, 1921. Reformed
Church Review, 4th Ser., XXV (1921), 196-220; Phi Beta Kappa
Key, March 1922, pp. 611-26.

“The Unity of the Arts.” Commencement address delivered at Hood
College, Frederick, Md., June, 1921. Printed in part in The Lesbian
(Hood College), July, 1921.

Address by Dr. Felix E. Schelling on the Occasion of the Unveiling of
a Portrait of Joseph G. Rosengarten, University of Pennsylvania,
Nov. 4, 1921, n.p., n.d.

“The American University: Is It Fulfilling Its Ideals?” Opening lec¬
ture in a series of “Faculty Talks” in the Foyer of the Academy
of Music, Nov. 15, 1921. The Pennsylvania Gazette, XX (1921),
126-27.

1922 Review: Sir George Greenwood: Shakespeare’s Law. University of

Pennsylvania Law Review, LXX (1922), 141-47.

“The College Man as I Know Him,” Red and Blue, XXXVI (1921-22),
285.

“Contemporary Poetry,” Schoolmen’s Week Proceedings (University
of Pennsylvania), IX (1922), 281-84.

Reviews in Philadelphia Public Ledger, Saturdays beginning May 13,
1922.

Review: R. M. Alden: Shakespeare. Alumni Register (University of
Pennsylvania), XXIV (1921-22), 605-07.

J. M. Robertson: The Shakespeare Canon. N. Y. Evening
Post Literary Review, III (Sept. 9, 1922), 5.

“Reasons for Teaching English Literature,” The Pennsylvania Gazette,
XXI (1922), 223-24.

Appraisements and Asperities as to Some Contemporary Writers,
Philadelphia and London, 1922.

1923 “Sidney’s Sister Pembroke’s Mother,” Johns Hopkins Graduates’ Maga¬

zine, 1923.

Foreign Influences in Elizabethan Plays, New York, 1923.

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

Raymond Macdonald Alden
Professor of English, Stanford University

IT is a matter of common knowledge that the critics of the Re¬
naissance inherited from the medieval period the problem of the
ethical justification of poetry, and attempted to solve it in cer¬
tain characteristic ways. The most characteristic medieval solution
was allegory: the tales of poets were made symbols of moral and
spiritual truths. The characteristic Renaissance solution was what
may be called Aristotelian idealism ; namely, the doctrine that poetry
is morally nobler and more efficacious than history, because it pre¬
sents ideal or general truth instead of particular facts. This posi¬
tion was held tenaciously throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and indeed has never become obsolete. A somewhat dif¬
ferent solution, appealing to a smaller number of critics, of more
mystical temperament, might be called Platonic idealism, — the doc¬
trine that earthly beauty is always an adumbration of heavenly
beauty, and hence that poetry, in revealing it, is perpetually leading
one to higher things. This was much closer to medieval feeling
than the doctrine with which I have compared it. It provided, for
such men as the Italian neo-platonists, an interesting means of re¬
futing Plato’s prejudices against poets out of his own mouth. But
it is less important for later criticism than the Aristotelian argument,
not only because it was less widely used — and more by poets than
critics — but because it tends to base the defence of poetry on mat¬
ters of religion rather than of morality.

The standard neo-classic doctrine of the morality of poetry (I
use “neo-classic” to cover the Renaissance period and the later per¬
iods which maintained the same critical doctrines) may be briefly
exemplified by one or two familiar passages, in order to have it
before our minds for comparison with later ideas. The purpose
of poetry, said Scaliger, is to teach delightfully (doc ere cum
delectatione ) 1 — a notion often connected, of course, with Horace’s
1 See Spingarn, Lit. Crit. in the Renaissance, p. 52.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

miscuit utile dulci ; to which Minturno, in his work De Poeta, added
the function of moving to admiration (and, implicitly, to imitation)
of the ideal persons whom the poet describes.1 In England Sir Philip
Sidney and Francis Bacon represent the same position, in state¬
ments which have become classic.

It is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with
that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a
poet by. . . . Whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth
a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done.
. . . For even those hard-hearted evil men . . . will be content to be de¬
lighted . . . and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they
cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of
cherries. ( Defense of Poesy.)

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which
satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more
heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of ac¬
tions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy
feigns them more just in retribution and more according to revealed provi¬
dence: ... so as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to mag¬
nanimity, morality, and to delectation. ( Advancement of Learning.)

Beyond this position criticism can scarcely be said to have ad¬
vanced, up to the end of the eighteenth century. It should also be
noted that these arguments of the neo-classic school are based al¬
most wholly on narrative poetry, the form which remained dominant,
except when its supremacy was threatened by the satiric, didactic,
or expository types, throughout the same period. Exceptions may
be found, — for instance, Sidney’s remarks on the stirring qualities of
a war-song ; but in general, as we know, the terms poetry and fiction
were almost interchangeable in the period in question, and the imagi¬
nation was thought of as the faculty which conceived persons and ac¬
tions transcending experience. It is much more than a coincidence,
then, that in the later period, when lyric poetry rapidly became the
dominant type, a new defence of poetry was created accordingly.

I am no lover of the term “romantic,” the meaning of which
no mortal has ever yet ascertained, and would gladly have avoided
it in the title of this paper. But it is obvious that there are certain
qualities and tendencies observable in the poetry of the age of Cole¬
ridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley (to speak of England alone), which
1 Ibid., p. 52.

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY 21

are intimately related with each other and with the theory of poetry
held by the same writers and many of their contemporaries. For
these qualities and tendencies the word “romantic” is a convenient
term, in general use. Now in the period and among the writers
in question, we are all conscious that a new attitude appears respect¬
ing the relations of imaginative literature and morality. In part
it is a matter of silence: the men of this age are not concerned, or
do not condescend, to defend the utilities of poetry. When they
speak of its two aspects or effects, pleasure and goodness, they are
likely to seem much more interested in the former, and less in the
latter, than their predecessors of the neo-classic era ; and sometimes
they explicitly state that to give pleasure is the characteristic, if
not the sole, function of poetry, with moral utility a mere by¬
product, — an indirect or incidental gratuity. If pressed to answer
the question whether poetry ministers to the moral nature in a defi¬
nite way, they are pretty certain to take the affirmative side ; but
they explain what they mean in partially new and often tantalizingly
vague terms. They do not point to the example of noble persons,
stimulating the reader to imitation, like the critics of the Renaissance.
They do not talk, like Sidney, of poetry pleasurably concealing in¬
struction as cherries may conceal medicine. And as for that sort
of poetry which is explicitly expository of moral ideas, they are
averse to admitting that it is poetic at all. The nature of the claim
which they make for the moral values of poetry — especially lyrical
— appears to be connected closely with certain other doctrines re¬
specting the character of the poetic process. I suppose that these
things have been remarked by every one; but it is curious that no
one seems to have undertaken to analyze them definitely. The fact
is that under the romantic influences, now dominant for more than
a century, critics interested in the history of imaginative art (with
a few more or less erratic exceptions like Ruskin and Tolstoy) have
had comparatively little interest in its relations with ethics; and
formal ethical criticism rarely throws much light on literature.

The chief names for our subject, in the period where it is
naturally centered, are Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, the
three poets who represented the most conscious intellectual aspects
of the romantic school, whose interests were ethical as well as imag¬
inative, and who wrote not only poetry but important criticism.
We should expect, I suppose, to find more material in Coleridge

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

than in either of the others, because of his well known and far-
reaching philosophic interests; but this would be a mistake. He
was a metaphysician (or aspired to be), but not an ethicist, and
says very little respecting the relation of poetry to morality, thoug
a good deal respecting its relation to philosophic truth. One of
the numerous works which he projected but never brought to pass
was a treatise on Poetry, and it appears from certain of his letters
that in this treatise he would have established the fundamental
unity of poetry and morality. On October 9, 1800, he wrote: Its
title would be an essay on the elements of poetry; it would be in
reality a disguised system of morals and politics.” ( Letters , p.
338.) And again on February 3, 1801 : “I have faith that I do
understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to
do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics,
and all the books of morals too.” (p. 347-) From such passages
we might be unprepared to find him declaring, as he does repeatedly
(e. g., in the Biographia and in various lecture fragments), that
the one main function of poetry is to give pleasure, without any
clear inference from pleasure to morals. Yet, though Coleridge
does not seem to have defined his views on this matter explicitly,
no one familiar with his criticism can doubt that he everywhere
assumed the moral, as well as the esthetic and philosophic, efficacy
of the poetic process.

The clue to this implication is probably to be found in his doc¬
trine of the imagination. To interpret this as an instrument of
morality may be to read something into Coleridge’s account from
what we find in the accounts of others, notably Wordsworth and
Shelley; but this is a legitimate device, in view of the links, both
external ^nd internal, which connect the various poets of the ro¬
mantic group. In his Lay Sermon on ‘‘The Statesman’s Manual”
Coleridge defined the imagination as “that reconciling and mediatory
power which, incorporating the reason in images of the senses,
. . . gives birth to a series of symbols, harmonious in themselves,
and consubstantial of the truths of which they are the conductors.”
(Bohn ed., p. 321.) This concerns primarily — like most of his re¬
marks on the same subject — the operations of the imagination as
an instrument for the revelation of truth; but that this revelation
has a specifically moral value is implied not only by the whole
course of the argument but by certain passages specifically. For

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

example take the passage in which, just as the romantics found
the sources of the decay of poetry in the eighteenth-century age
of reason, Coleridge goes to the same place for the source of spir¬
itual and moral decay: “It seems to have been about the middle
of the last century, under the influence of Voltaire, D’Alembert,
Diderot, say generally of the so-called encyclopaedists, . . . that
the human understanding, and this too in its narrowest form, was
tempted to throw off all show of reverence to the spiritual and
even to the moral powers and impulses of the soul ; and, usurping
the name of reason, openly joined the banners of Antichrist.” {Ibid.,
p. 346.)

What Coleridge implies and suggests, Wordsworth sets forth
with some clearness. The substantial identity of his doctrine with
that of his friend is due, of course, to the fact that to some extent
they worked it out together. Like Coleridge, Wordsworth affirms
that the primary function of poetry is to please, and in enumerating
“the powers requisite for the production of poetry” (opening of
the Preface of 1815) he does not include either a theoretical or a
practical mastery of morality. But, like Coleridge again, he empha¬
sizes the dignity and the penetrative power of the imagination in a
way to suggest moral values, and in his famous statement that
“poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” may naturally
be thought to include ethical knowledge with the rest. But his really
characteristic position respecting our problem is of a somewhat dif¬
ferent character. It concerns not so much the imaginative as
the emotional aspect of poetry, and is implied in the numerous pas¬
sages in which he refers to the peculiar “sensibility” of the poet.
In some sense the training of the feelings, by appropriate exercise,
is for him a highly important function of the poetic art ; and we
are enabled to infer the moral significance of this training by re¬
calling some of his most characteristic poems, such as “Simon Lee”
and “Resolution and Independence,” in which he seeks to exem¬
plify it with special clearness. The great Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads touches on the subject in one passage, and in a single sen¬
tence (a most ungainly one, which ought to be two or three) gives
us, I think, the heart of the matter. The poet is explaining why
his ballads, though extremely simple in form, are to be distinguished
from poems accused of “triviality and meanness of thought.” One
ground of distinction is that each of them will be found to have “a

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

worthy purpose,” even though that purpose was not consciously
in the writer’s mind when he began the act of composition. Now
for the sentence to which I just referred :

Our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our
thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings ; and
as, by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each
other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and
continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important sub¬
jects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such
habits of mind will be produced that, by obeying blindly and mechanically
the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments,
of such a nature, and in such connection with each other, that the under¬
standing of the reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and
his affections strengthened and purified. (Works, Globe ed., p. 851.)

In other words, rightly trained feelings are the source of sound
thinking; and sound thinking generates feeling which spontaneously
communicates itself, through poetry, to others, thereby again setting
up the formation of both fine feelings and right ideas. This proc¬
ess is certainly, in large measure, moral in character. I need not
pause to point out how significant is such a piece of reasoning as
this, both of Wordsworth himself and of the period when the so-
called “organic” character of the poetic process was a new and vital
conception.1

It was De Quincey, years afterward, who set forth most explicitly this
aspect of Wordsworth's doctrine, doubtless in good part because of his in¬
veterate admiration of the poet’s work: I refer to the account of “the litera¬
ture of power" in the essay on Pope (1848). For De Quincey “the literature
of power means, of course, substantially the same as the “poetry” of Cole¬
ridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley,— that is, literature of the imagination with¬
out special reference to the question of prose or verse form. Note especially
these passages : * J

It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the litera¬
ture of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and
has its field of action. . Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee all
alike restore to man s mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy
of retribution which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities3)’
would languish for want of sufficient illustration. . . . Hence the preemi-
nency over all authors that merely teach, of the meanest that moves or that
teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. ” 1

fc„™The COmb,natrf int0 'Yh,ich the P°etry of this planet has thrown our
human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt exercise
a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated when
And^ofTbi^Yi11^ many generatl0,ns- without a sentiment allied to awe

wh.ch he has reld^manv a he °VeS t0 the imPa^oned books'

• , ne nas ,read many a thousand more of emotions than he ran rnn

ISF - xa s* sattfe -ESI

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

Beside the passage just quoted let me also put a sentence from
a letter of Wordsworth’s written some time later. The destiny of
his poems, he wrote to Lady Beaumont, is “to console the afflicted;
to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier ; to teach
the young, and the gracious of every age, to see, to think, and feel,
and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous.” (May
21, 1807; Knight’s Life, ii, 88.) Again we see the poet’s view of
the natural moral effect of his art: perception, feeling, reflection,
are to be stimulated, with both pleasure and virtue as the result.1

When we pass to Shelley, we find him rather more concerned
to discuss our subject than either Coleridge or Wordsworth, though
perhaps not so consistent in his theory and practice. He shared,
in general, the views of his fellow poets of the romantic group,
respecting the non-didactic nature of poetry, and at the same time
was more disposed than any of them to make his poetry a specific
instrument in behalf of social morality as he viewed it. (In this
comparison I do not include the later poetry of Wordsworth, writ¬
ten when his method had become specifically didactic.) In the
Preface to the comparatively early Revolt of Islam Shelley wrote:

I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal
combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion,
all those elements which essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal
and comprehensive morality, and in the view of kindling within the bosoms
of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and jus¬
tice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor
misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind.
(Works, Globe ed., p. 95.)

This is frank and clear, and the whole poem bears out the inten¬
tion: the hero and heroine of the tale preach, from the beginning
to the end of their careers, but depend on emotional stimulus —
“the kindling of a virtuous enthusiasm” — for the conversion of their
hearers. A year later Shelley published a drama, The Cenci, in
which there was no preaching at all, and in his preface disclaimed
any attempt to make the exhibition of tragic suffering and crime

1 One might find some analogous emphasis on the element of feeling in
Coleridge too ; as where, in “The Statesman’s Manual” again, he observes that
Shakespeare “has placed the greater number of his profoundest maxims and
general truths, both political and moral, not in the mouths of men at ease,
but of men under the influence of passion.” (Bohn ed., p. 314.)

26 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

“subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. Yet he
felt impelled to raise the question of the ethical end of such an
exhibition, and added : “The highest moral purpose aimed at in
the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart,
through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself ; in
proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every human being
is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind.” {Ibid., p. 298.) Obvi¬
ously we are here very close to the Wordsworthian doctrine.

Again, a year later, in introducing the drama of Prometheus
Unbound, Shelley recurred to the subject, with an increased em¬
phasis on the distinction between direct and indirect moral aims.

It is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely
to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any de¬
gree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic
poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose
that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto
been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select
classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence;
aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and
endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the high¬
way of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust. {Ibid.,
P. 247.)

The phrase “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” reminds us
of the Renaissance critics, and in particular of the Platonists; and
these, as we shall see presently, Shelley was studying at this period
(1820). The same reminder becomes still more impressive when
we turn to his chief discussion of our subject, the Defence of
Poetry (written 1821).

This piece of passionate criticism, it will be recalled, was in¬
tended as a reply to an essay of Thomas Love Peacock’s (“The
Four Ages of Poetry”), in which the writer’s attack upon poetry
was not based primarily — if at all — on moral grounds. But in
the course of his argument Shelley took up the traditional objec¬
tion, which went back to Plato and the Christian fathers, that a great
part of the characters and manners of poetry are “remote from
moral perfection.” His first answer to this is to the effect that
poets clothe their characters in the admittedly ephemeral manners of
whatever age is represented, “which cover without concealing the
eternal proportions of their beauty.” Following this he comes to

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

the gist of the matter, in a highly characteristic and important
passage :

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon
a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
domestic life : nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate,
and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But
poetry acts in another and diviner manner. [Here Shelley clearly echoes
Sidney, whose Defense he had been re-reading to fortify himself for the
present argument.] It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering
it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. . . .
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and
an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively ; he must put himself in the place of another
and of many others ; the pains and pleasures of his species must become
his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry
administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. . . . Poetry strengthens
the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
manner as exercise strengthens a limb. (Works, ed. Forman, vii, in.)

Two distinguishable claims, here made for the moral utility of
poetry, must be noted, as summed up in two striking affirmations.
“The great secret of morals is love and “The great instrument of
moral good is the imagination.” The latter point, the same which
had already been made in the Preface to The Cenci, is substantially
— as I have already remarked — the doctrine of Wordsworth. The
former is more characteristically Shelleyan ; it was not, of course, a
wholly new invention, but was his special contribution to the poetics
of his time. And as the great part of Wordsworth’s early poetry
is a commentary on his doctrine of the moral functions of the feel¬
ings, so the great part of Shelley’s poetry is a commentary on his
conception that the love of the beautiful is the fulfilling of the moral
law.

Though I am confining myself, in this discussion, to the literary
theories of the poets concerned, and not to their poetic practice, it
seems well to pause for a moment to remark the further implica¬
tions, with respect to the doctrines of Shelley just noticed, of two
of the most important of his autobiographic poems. I refer to the
dedication of The Revolt of Islam and the Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty. In the former, it will be recalled, he describes the early

28 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

impression made upon his nature when the voices heard from a
schoolroom seemed to him

but one echo from a world of woes — •

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

This moment he now thinks of as “the hour which burst my spirit’s
sleep.” With streaming eyes (like those of Rousseau when there
first occurred to him his notion of natural liberty in contrast with
the tyrannies of civilization), he cried:

I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise.

Clearly this is just such a complex of imaginative feeling and moral
impulse as he came to consider to be the supreme product of poetry.
In like manner, in the “Hymn to Beauty,” he recalls the moment
when its shadow fell upon him :

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy !

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow?

But the notable point is, that in the following lines he abruptly con¬
nects this dedication with the hope that the Beauty, the “awful
Loveliness,” to which his allegiance was pledged, would “free this
world from its dark slavery,” binding its votary

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Again we see Shelley’s conception of the inseparable nature of
beauty and moral goodness.

So much for a very brief survey of the doctrines of the chief
romantic poets on the subject in hand. Before passing to a note
or two regarding the sources of their doctrines, let me pause to
call attention to a dissenting voice. As all theories are profitably
studied through their opposites, the romantic theory of poetry is
made to stand out the more clearly by contrasting it with the tra¬
ditional view as it survived in the new age; and for this survival
we do not need to go to some hard-hearted reviewer of the Edin¬
burgh or the Quarterly, but find it most strikingly set forth in

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

the critical opinions of Byron. Lord Byron, as we know, was so
far from professing himself a romantic among his fellows, that he
repeatedly stated that his contemporaries were all on the wrong
track, and that English poetry would never recover itself except by
a return to the doctrines and practice of the age of Pope. This
position is specifically interpreted with reference to the moral values
of poetry, in his “Letter to John Murray, Esq., on the Rev. W. L.
Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope,” written
in the same year with Shelley’s Defence. For poets, as for men,
Byron declared, ethics is the chief claim to greatness ; hence we
are to reject the notion of the romantics that “ethical poetry, or
didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, is not the very
first order of poetry.” And it is clear that whenever he talks of
ethics in poetry, he has in mind no vague implication, no mere
training of the finer feelings to moral ends, such as his contem¬
poraries emphasized, but the straightforward exposition of moral
truth, as found in the poetic essays of Pope, — the concise formula¬
tion of the accumulated judgment of the race. Consistently with
this, Byron despised the prevalent tendency to exalt the imagina¬
tion as the soul of poetry ; “an Irish peasant with a little whiskey
in his head,” he said, had more imagination than any of the poets.
I repeat that his persistent and consistent defence of the superiority
of the neo-classic poets makes his view of our present subject sig¬
nificant and instructive.1

It remains to offer a few observations on the probable sources of
the romantic doctrine of the moral function of poetry. This is
not a problem of a definite character, nor susceptible of positive
demonstration ; for, in the first place, we have seen that the new
doctrine is not wholly different from, much less inconsistent with,
the old. The distinction, one might say, is one of emphasis rather
than of substance. Nevertheless I take it to be a matter of no
little interest to inquire how this difference of emphasis came about,
and what are the springs whence flowed into the criticism of the
early nineteenth century the characteristic elements which we have
been observing in the new poetics.

1 Cf. a note in his Diary, for 1817 : “With regard to poetry in general, I
am convinced that we are all upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system,
not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe
are free.”

3°

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The sources of Coleridge’s teaching are of first importance, even
though he said so little on our subject explicitly ; for we know how
his influence — that of his conversation and lectures quite as much
as of his published writings — overspread the criticism of his age.
For his view of the imagination it is common to emphasize his rela¬
tionship to Kant and Schelling.1 The subject is far too large to
be discussed here ; I wish only to recall the suggestions made above,
that in all probability the transcendental or romantic view of the
moral significance of poetry was closely connected with this trans¬
cendental or romantic view of the imagination. But in Kant there
was more, pertinent to our subject, than his teaching as to the imagi¬
nation. For example, there was his view of “beauty as the symbol
of morality,2 — a quite different thing, as I understand it, from the
neo-platonic mysticism which tended to identify beauty and good¬
ness, but sounding much like it in the ears of vague thinkers. And
especially we should recall the interesting passage at the close of
the Dialectic of Esthetic Judgment , which is actually concerned
with morality as servant of art rather than with art as servant of
morality, but which obviously can be made to work both ways :

The propaedeutic of all fine art, so far as the highest degree of its per¬
fection is what is in view, appears to lie, not in precepts, but in the culture
of the mental powers produced by a sound preparatory education in what
are called the humaniora — so called, presumably, because humanity signifies,
on the one hand, the universal feeling of sympathy, and, on the other, the
faculty of being able to communicate universally one’s inmost self ( sich
innigst und allgemein mittheilen) , — properties constituting in conjunction the
befitting social spirit of mankind. . . . Taste is, in the ultimate analysis, a
critical faculty that judges of the rendering of moral ideas in terms of
sense, . . . and it is this rendering also, and the increased sensibility, founded
upon it, for the feeling which these ideas evoke (termed moral sense), that
are the origin of that pleasure which taste declares valid for mankind in

1 See, for example, Shawcross’s introduction to his edition of the Bio-
graphia Literaria, especially pp. xliii, lvii, lx-lxi. “In Kant he found assigned
to [the imagination] a universal function in the construction of experience
— that of mediating between the data of sense and the forms of the under¬
standing.” “To the imagination Schelling daringly assigns a function of
high, indeed of the highest, dignity and importance. It is proclaimed as the
organ of truth, and of truth not as the artist only, but as the philosopher
apprehends it.”

1 Critique of ^Esthetic Judgment, bk. ii, § 59: “The beautiful is the symbol
of the morally good, and only in this light . . . does it give us pleasure with
an attendant claim to the agreement of every one else.” (Meredith trans¬
lation.)

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

general and not merely for the private feeling of each individual. This
makes it clear that the true propaedeutic for laying the foundations of
taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling.
(§60; Meredith translation, pp. 226-27.)

If we were to connect this argument with the theories of Words¬
worth and Shelley as to the social values of poetically trained feel¬
ings, we should have little doubt that, like Coleridge, they had found
in Kant the expression of ideas already half formed in their own
minds. Neither of them, in fact, was a student of Kant; but how
much of his theory Coleridge may have transmitted to them it is
impossible to say.

As for Wordsworth’s critical sources, formally speaking, they
seem to be almost negligible, outside his relations with Coleridge.
He does not appear to have made a student’s use of his winter in
Germany, following the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and was
notoriously not a reader of criticism.1 “Aristotle, I have been told,
has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing,” he ob¬
serves in his important Preface, without troubling himself to verify
the rumor. But that which Coleridge derived from the Germans,
Wordsworth could not escape ; and I have already pointed out how
far one aspect of the Kantian doctrine was at least congenial to his
own thinking. In connection with his more individual point of view
one is tempted to think of Rousseau, whose emphasis on the values
of personal feeling, or sensibility, exerted so far-reaching an influ¬
ence. There is almost no positive evidence that Wordsworth was
a student of Rousseau, unless it be that early editions of Emile and
the Confessions were in his library;2 but it has been common to
assume that his early exaltation of personal liberty, natural sim¬
plicity, and childhood shows traces of the great romanticist. Pro¬
fessor Harper finds unmistakable evidences (especially in The Pre¬
lude) of the doctrine of the Emile “that Nature’s first impulses are
always right, and there is no original perversity in the human
heart.” 3 He does not mention, among the Rousseauistic elements
in Wordsworth, that emphasis on the moral value of sensibility

’Professor Lane Cooper shows him to have been much more a student
than has often been supposed (“A Glance at Wordsworth’s Reading,” in
Methods and Aims in the Study of Literature, 1915) ; but the evidence reveals
very little in the critical field.

2 As catalogued after his death; see Harper’s Wordsworth, i, 151 note.

’ Ibid., i, 47; see also pp. 128-34, and Professor Cooper’s observations on
pp. 129-30 of the essay cited above.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

which I mentioned a moment ago, but it may be viewed as implicit
in such doctrines as that of the insight of childhood. The child views
the facts of life with unperverted simplicity, (as in “We are Seven”),
or sub specie ceternitatis (as in “Intimations of Immortality”) ;
and it is obvious that poetry, in presenting this aspect of childhood,
is functioning in the direction of moral education. It might be
said, too, that Wordsworth’s declaration that our thoughts are, pri¬
marily, “the representatives of all our past feelings,” is of the spirit
of Rousseau.1 Influences from this direction, then, would naturally
combine with those emanating from the German transcendentalists
concerning the moral value of the imagination.

As for Shelley, he valued neither German nor French criticism
highly, nor does he seem to have concerned himself directly with
the theories of Wordsworth or Coleridge, though of course he in¬
herited some of the influences which we have been considering on
both sides. By preference, he went back to the critics of the
Renaissance, and still further to Plato, for his creed. Thus he uses,
as we have seen, some of the conventional defences of the sixteenth-
century theorists, side by side with others of a different kind. In
particular, we notice his tendency to adopt the neo-platonic con¬
fusion (or identification) of the beautiful with the good, and to
find therein a sufficient proof of the supremely moral value of
poetry.2 There was one of the Renaissance theorists on poetry who
was more a Platonist than an Aristotelian, and whose position
Shelley seems to recall with special definiteness: I mean the poet
Tasso. In the words of Dr. Spingarn, “his conception of the func¬
tion of poets . . . may be explained as follows. The universe is
beautiful in itself, because beauty is a ray from the divine splen¬
dor; and hence art should seek to approach as closely as possible to
nature, and to catch and express this natural beauty of the world.
. . . The beautiful is what pleases every one, just as the good is
what every one desires. Beauty is therefore the flower of the good
(quasi un fiore del buono ) ; it is the circumference of the circle of
which the good is the centre, and accordingly, poetry, as an ex-

‘See Babbitt’s The New Laocoon, passim, for remarks on the Rousseau-
lstic elements in Wordsworth's view of the superiority of emotional insight
to reason. 6

’This, to be sure, is not unlike what we have seen in Kant, and is per¬
haps to be distinguished from matter drawn from German sources rather
by form and phrasing than by substantial content.

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

pression of this beauty, imitates the outward show of life in its
general aspects. Poetry is therefore an imitation of human actions,
made for the guidance of life.” 1 We know that Shelley had been
reading Tasso during his residence in Italy, and he quotes him
directly in the Defence of Poetry.2 It is therefore most probable
that he found in this idealist of the Renaissance a source for his
special method of connecting his idea of the poet who eternally
pursues the spirit of beauty with the idea of the poet as one who
leads mankind into goodness.

To summarize this very imperfect survey of the question: we
may suppose that the new romantic doctrine of poetry as an instru¬
ment of morality drew (i) from the more romantic elements in con¬
temporary German philosophy, (2) from the Rousseauists’ teaching
as to the supreme value of personal feeling, and (3) from a revived
study of some of the neo-platonism of the Rennaissance. Without
disturbing themselves to inquire as to the consistency of these vari¬
ous explanations, as a student of philosophy or formal esthetic would
have been forced to do, the poets of the new age found them suf¬
ficiently harmonious for the purpose in hand. This purpose was
to support the inner conviction that poetry need not formally con¬
cern itself with moral teaching, and at the same time is funda¬
mentally an ally, even a generator, of morality. In the present dis¬
cussion I have, of course, wholly omitted any consideration of the
validity of the arguments we have been studying, as compared with
the neo-classic critical system which, together with the corresponding
poetic system, they largely superseded. How far it is true that
good poetry, if faithful to its own laws of pleasure and beauty, is
essentially a moral force, may still be an open question. The answer
of any individual will probably depend on the degree in which he
is, in general, an adherent of the romantic position.

1 Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, pp. S6-.S7.

* See Cook’s edition, p. 42.

■

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE.

Albert C. Baugh

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

THAT the Chester plays are indebted to a French source is an
opinion often expressed and frequently challenged. Those
who maintain it with most assurance are not always specific
as to the grounds for their belief. On the other hand, those who
deny foreign influence altogether take the comfortable position that
the burden of proof rests on the other side. Meanwhile the most
cautious adopt the only safe course, that of guarded, non-committal
statements. Since the question is admittedly a vexed one and is
of considerable importance in the history of the English drama, it
deserves a reexamination.

Some years before a French source was specifically affirmed for
the Chester cycle, the general resemblance between the English and
French mysteries had been noticed. In 1818, Markland observed:
“The traces of resemblance apparent in the English and Foreign
Mysteries, as well in the choice of subjects, as in the manner of
treating them, are so numerous and striking, that we cannot but at¬
tribute these productions to one common source.” 1 Sharp in his
Dissertation (1825) adds that if the English cycles are “not ab¬
stracted from the French Mysteries (as some have supposed) . . .
[they] certainly are much like them.” (p. 8) In 1831 Collier, at¬
tempting to explain the tradition that Higden was thrice at Rome
before he could obtain leave of the Pope to have the plays in Eng¬
lish, suggested that the Chester plays were originally in French.
This supposition explains, he says, the occasional passage of French
found in the Cycle. As an additional ground for his belief he

1 Markland, J. H., A Dissertation on the Chester Mysteries. Roxburgh
Club, 1818; reprinted Malone, Shakespeare, 1821, III, 525-549. He also
notes that in the Slaughter of the Innocents the child of Herod is said to be
destroyed in the general massacre.

36 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

printed four passages in the Chester plays with what he considered
significant parallels from the Old French Mystere du Viel Testa h
merit. When Wright edited the plays for the Shakespeare Society
(1843-47) he included Collier’s conjecture and reprinted the “one
or two remarkable coincidences” which Collier pointed out ; but while
he suggested a few additional French parallels in his notes, he went
no further than to say: “How far the English sets of Mysteries were
translations from French originals, I am inclined to doubt: but if
any were so, the Chester Mysteries appear to have the greatest
claim to that distinction.” 1 Ebert 2 is frankly agnostic. The
English cycles are neither translations nor imitations of French
versions, though French influence in individual pieces may have
occurred either at the time of original composition or by later in¬
corporations. Finally Ward, in the first edition of his History,3
while echoing Wright, pretty well expresses the opinion of his day
when he says: “Whether or to what extent some of them [the
Chester plays] were translations from French originals, remains
doubtful ; but several remarkable coincidences have been pointed out
. . . between the Chester Plays and French Mysteries, in particular
the Mystere du Viel Testament.” This may be taken as closing
the first stage in the history of the question. Uncertainty is the
keynote, an unwillingness in most cases to deny the possibility of
French influence, yet a hesitation to accept it as proved. After all
the evidence so far advanced was too slight to justify a conclusion.

If the attitude of early students was one of hesitancy and doubt,
that of the immediately following group may be characterized as
one of assurance. TenBrink began (1888) by expressing the opinion
that it is scarcely by accident that these Chester Plays should have

a greater resemblance to the French Mysteries than the other Eng¬
lish cycles have. In 1888 and 1890 respectively appeared two
studies that for a time further influenced scholarly opinion in favor
of a French source. Hohlfeld,5 in a valuable study was impressed
by the parallel passages adduced by Collier and Wright, and still
1 Chester Plays, I, xiv.

k- 3 r^!rt’ A ,Die Englischen Mysterien.” Jahrbuch fur Romanische und
und Literatur, I (1859), 44-82; i3w7o.

4t aiR^’ A D ’ A History of English Dramatic Literature 187s I 4?
TenBrink, B, History of English Literature (En8l.sh AKon)?II,

, "Ohlfeld, A., Die Altenglischen Kollektiv-Mysterien Halle
fished in more complete form in Anglia, XI (1889), 219-310.

pub-

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 37

more by the presence of certain passages in French in the Chester
plays and certain allusions to France which he believed could only
be accounted for as remains of an earlier French text. He scarcely
would go so far as to say that the English cycle is a direct imitation
of a French collective cycle, but believes “dass der autor von Ch ein
franzdsisches misterium von der geburt und passion Christi, aus
dem die franzosischen stellen in Ch stammen wiirden, als spezialle
vorlage benutzte. ...” 1 He suggests that a close and systematic
comparison of the Chester plays with the French religious drama
would probably yield still further important results. Such a com¬
parison was presented two years later by Ungemach.2 Ungemach
made a laborious and painstaking examination of the first five plays
in comparison with various earlier or roughly contemporary treat¬
ments, including the Mystere du Viel Testament, Greban’s Mystere
de la Passion, Peter Comestor, The Cursor Mundi, and the like. We
shall return to his argument later. It will be sufficient here to
note his conclusion with respect to French sources. He is quite
specific. The Viel Testament and Greban’s Passion were important
sources of the author both in matters of detail and in general plan.
He admits that the question is complicated by the fact that the Viel
Testament and the Chester plays both exist in late redactions, but
this fact does not disturb his general conclusion. In subsequent
criticism it is possible to trace the influence of Hold f eld and Unge¬
mach quite distinctly. Davidson (1892) says: “The Chester Plays
are, as Hohlfeld has well said, the work of a translator,” but he
inclines to the opinion that the cycle was not French but Anglo-
Norman.3 Suchier, reviewing Ungemach’s dissertation, accepts his
conclusions as to French sources.4 Ward in the second edition of
his History (1899) added to his previous statement the words,
“but a more systematic enquiry seems to make it probable that the
author or authors of the Chester Plays on Old Testament subjects
were likewise acquainted with earlier, non-collective French mys-

1 Op. cit., p. 11 ( Anglia , XI, 227).

3 Ungemach, H., Die Quellen der fiinf ersten Chester Plays (Munchener
Beitrage, 1), 1890.

3 Davidson, C., Studies in the English Mystery Plays, 1892, p. 254.

* Literaturblatt fur germ, und rom. Phil., XII (1891), 86-7 : “Wir sind
mit dem Verf. der Ueberzeugung, dass nicht die erhaltenen Texte . . .
sondern ein franzosiches Collectivmysterium die Quelle bildete, das den
Adam als Quelle verwerthet und selbst eine der Quellen des Myst. du Viel
Test, gebildet hat.”

3«

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

teries.” More recently Gayley has echoed Ungemach’s conclusions.1

After such an apparently growing acceptance of French plays
as sources of the Chester cycle, it is a little surprising to find of
late years the critical pendulum swinging in the other direction and
to observe a tendency today to deny largely the existence of French
influence. Yet even at the time Ungemach’s dissertation was pub¬
lished there were those who refused to accept his results. Deimling,
the editor of the Chester Plays for the E. E. T. S., in a review of
the study believed the parallels offered by Ungemach were not suf¬
ficiently close to prove indebtedness.2 Subsequently Hemingway
expressed the belief that French influence on the Chester dramatist
was not particularly strong, no stronger than upon any cultivated
man of the time.3 Almost simultaneously Utesch in a study of the
sources of the cycle as a whole admitted that the Chester plays pos¬
sess various points of contact with French mysteries but decided
that it was impossible to accept the latter as source. “The corre¬
spondences are to be accounted for by the common Latin sources.
A knowledge of French pieces, however, is not to be denied for the
English authors. In the writing of their plays they have gone to
work independently, but they have learned from the French.” *
Other recent scholars — Chambers, Schelling, Creizenach, Pollard,
for example — have been non-committal or have refrained entirely
from expressing an opinion. There, with opinion still divided and
very uncertain, the problem rests today.

The chief difficulty of the student today in attempting to reach
a decision in the question is in properly evaluating the evidence on
both sides. Advocates of a French source have advanced at one
time or another various grounds for their belief ; and these have
been countered by different opponents in different ways. They can
all be grouped, however, into five large categories :

1. Parallel passages in the Chester cycle and French plays.

2. The presence of the French language and French derivatives
in the Chester plays.

1 In 1903 in his Representative English Comedies, I, xxxiv, and in 1907 in
Plays of Our Forefathers, 323.

3 Herrig’s Archiv, LXXXVI (1891), 428-21. Deimling’s untimely death
before the completion of his edition of the plays left that edition without the
promised discussion of the question of French sources.

* Hemingway, S. B., English Nativity Plays, 1909, pp. xxiv-xxvii.

4 Utesch, H., Die Quellen der Chester Plays, Kiel, 1909, p. 94.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 39

3. References to France in the cycle.

4. Features (episodes and characters) supposedly characteristic
of French, as opposed to English, tradition.

5. The plan of the cycle and the structure of certain plays.

It will be best to consider each of these classes of evidence separately.

II.

In the study of sources, there is perhaps no type of literary
testimony so immediately convincing as the deadly evidence of
parallel passages. At the same time no form of proof seems to lend
itself so easily to misuse. Slight resemblances of ideas are at times
taken as evidence of relationship where none exists, and collections of
such inconclusive “parallels” are assembled apparently on the theory
that a sufficient number of passages no one of which has any value as
evidence, collectively proves something. Furthermore, there would
be no need to point out how careful one must be in dealing with
literary material in the Middle Ages, especially when it has a basis
in Biblical or theological tradition, were it not that it has been so
frequently forgotten in discussions of the sources of the Chester
plays. Before the evidence of parallel passages can be considered
in this connection, it is necessary to insist that there be either (1)
significant verbal agreement, or (2) an idea so distinctive that it is
not to be traced to an equally probable common source, and is not
a commonplace of medieval thought likely to be in the air and there¬
fore likely to be duplicated in corresponding contexts elsewhere. It
is fair to ask whether the parallel passages so far adduced between
the Chester plays and the French religious drama are of such a
character.

The principal attempt to present parallels is that of Ungemach,
mentioned above. In a dissertation of nearly two hundred pages
he devoted himself chiefly to discovering in the French drama pas¬
sages which he could place alongside of as many portions of the
first five Chester plays as possible. In judging his work the first
question we must ask is naturally : Are the parallels close, verbally
or in distinctive ideas ? And the answer we are forced to make is
negative. A painstaking scrutiny, one by one, of all the parallels
offered has resulted in but a single impression. Ninety percent of
them are frankly such as ought not to have been seriously advanced.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

In support of this opinion, a fairly normal example may be quoted.
It is from the speech of Lucifer after the creation of the angels

(P- 32) •'

nyne orders here be witterlye,
that you have made here full brighte ;
In thie blisse full righte they be,

And I the principall lord here in
thie sight.1

(I, 37-40)

Mercy vous rens de ma creacion,
Qui m’avez fait tant digne et vertu-
able ;

De vous je obtiens lueur inestimable,
Par vostre grace et saincte amour
benigne,

Et m’avez faict puissant et venerable
Comme porteur de lumiere admirable,
Resplendissant en la gloire divine.

( V.T., 88-94)

Here there is neither verbal resemblance nor anything distinctive
in the idea. The same thought can be found in the Cursor Mundi
and in almost any medieval treatment of the Fall of Lucifer. A
more questionable practice of Ungemach's is to draw together dis¬
connected lines by the use of points of suspension. The result pre¬
sents a specious appearance of parallelism where in realty it does
not exist. An extreme illustration of this practice will be found on
pp. 116-118 of his dissertation. Here, in a passage too long to
quote, he parallels a dozen lines from the Chester Deluge with frag¬
ments culled from over four hundred lines of the Viel Testament !

The few parallels in Ungemach that at first sight do arrest the
attention lose all or most of their force when scrutinized more closely.
For example Adam’s lament over Eve : 2

Alas ! in languor now I am lent !
alas, now shamfullie I am shente !
for I was inobedyente. . . .

(II. 345-7)

Las! qu’esse qui je fere?

Trop me suis deshonnore,

Qui me suis advanture
De ceste pome mengier !

( V.T., 1561-4)

This seems mildly significant until we find the York “Allas! what
haue I done, for shame 1” and an equally close parallel in the Ludus
Coven trice. Another instance is the speech in which Adam names
Eve Virago : 3

1 All citations from the Chester plays are from Deimling’s edition in the
E.E.T.S., 1892-1914. Le Mystere de la Passion d’Arnould Greban is
edited by Gaston Paris and Gaston Raynaud, Paris, 1878. The Arras text
is edited by J. M. Richard, Le Mystere de la Passion . . . d’ Arras Arras
1891, and was, obviously, not used by Ungemach.

1 Ungemach, p. 71.

3 Ungemach, p. 53.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 41

Therfore shall she be called, I wis,

virago, nothing amisse,

for out of man taken she is,

and to man shall she draw. (II. 149-152)

A similar speech occurs in no other English cycles, but is found in
French in the Viel Testament, in Greban, and in the Arras Passion,
to name no others. Yet its significance is slight because it is taken
literally from Genesis, II 23-4, from which the author of the Cursor
Mundi also took it. Again, Ungemach lays stress on God’s speech
driving Adam from Paradise, which extends to two full stanzas
and which he parallels in a general way by passages in the Mysore
d’Adam and Greban.1 But in saying that such a speech is lacking
in the other English cycles he goes too far. God speaks to the same
effect in the Ludus Coventrice :

ffor 3our synne that 3e have do,

Out of this blysse sone xal 3e go,

In erthely labour to levyn in wo,

And sorwe the xal atast.
ffor your synne and mysdoyng,

An angelle with a swerd brennyng,

Out of this joye he xal 30U dyng,

Sour welthe awey is past. (p.30-1)

It is also more briefly expressed in the York play (V. 160-2) and
in the Cursor Mundi (II. 937 ff.). It was not necessary for the
Chester playwright to go to a French source.

Two passages require special consideration because they do seem
striking at first sight and because they were first pointed out by
Collier and have been more generally noticed than others in Unge¬
mach. The first is the speech in which Isaac asks Abraham to cover
his eyes when he kills him :

Father, I pray you, hyde myne eyne
That I se not your sword so kene ;
your stroke, father, wold I not seene,
lest I against yt grill.

(IV. 337-40)

Mais vueillez moy les yeulx cachier,
Affin que le glaive ne voye
Quant de moy vendres approchier;
Peult estre que je fouyroye.®

(V.T., 10227-30)

1 Ungemach, pp. 74-75.

’Ungemach, p. 150. The idea is repeated in the Chester Play two pages
farther on:

Father, if you be to me kinde,
about my heade a kercher bynde,
and let me lightlie out of your mynde,
and sone that I were spedd.

(IV. 385-8)

42 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

It is a striking touch not in the Bible ; but its significance is nullified
by the occurrence of the same idea in the Brome Abraham ana Isaac.

But I prey 30U fader to hyd my eyne,

That I see not fie stroke of 3owe scharpe sword,

That my fleysse schall defyle. (221-3)

and in the York Sacrifice of Isaac:

For fadir, I aske no more respete,

Bot here a worde what I wolde mene,

I beseke 30U or fiat 3e smyte,

Lay doune fiis kyrcheffe on myn eghne. ... (X: 285-8)

Even in the Lucius Coven-trice there seems to be a reminiscence of
the speech in Abraham’s words : “With this kerchere I kure thi
face, In the tyme that I sle the” (p. 54). It is a stage convention of
the play, like Petruchio’s whip.

The second of the two passages is in the play of Balaam and
Balak, where the ass says :

am I not. Master, thyne owne Ass,
to beare thie whether thou wilt passe,
And many winter readie was.1

(V. 177-9)

Ballaam, suis je pas ta beste,

Sur qui tu as tous jours este,

Tant en yver comme en este;

(V.T., 26915-17)

Of course the passage is based on Numbers, XXII. 30 : “Am not I
thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto
this day?” (usque in praesentem diem) ; but Collier was struck by
the occurrence of the word winter in both passages. Yet in spite
of the fact that the same word occurs in both texts the idea is not
the same. In the Chester play winters is used for years, whereas in
the Viel Testament the word yver forms part of the phrase winter
and summer obviously inserted for the sake of the rime. The re¬
semblance is probably quite accidental.

It has seemed necessary to submit Ungemach’s material to this
somewhat detailed examination, because, while his results have
been several times accepted and rejected, his methods and his evi¬
dence have never been specifically discussed. One further word
is necessary concerning his methods. He drew his parallels not
from one text but from wherever he could find them in the Old

‘Ungemach, 183. This is the reading of three MSS. The MS. selected
by Deimling as the basis of his text omits the word winter:
that ever before ready was
to beare the whether thou woldest pas?

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 43

French drama. In the hunt for parallel passages he seems to have
lost sight of the original purpose of his quest — to find a source. A
mosaic of parallels pieced together from various places, — one from
the Viel Testament, one from the Mystkre d’Adam, another from
Greban’s Passion, with the gaps filled in with quotations from Peter
Comestor, or Josephus, or the Cursor Mundi — does not leave the
reader with a very satisfactory feeling when all is done. In read¬
ing, one has the constant desire to turn to the text as a whole. We
shall return to this suggestion later. For the present we can only
conclude that if the evidence of parallel passages were all that the
question of French influence depended upon, it could be dismissed
without further discussion. But there are other considerations.

III.

Scattered through the Chester Cycle are five passages of French,
ranging in length from four to sixteen lines as follows :

1. Sixteen lines (VI. 209-224) forming two stanzas of a long,
boastful speech (12 stanzas) by the Emperor Octavian. They
are corrupt beyond recovery.

2. Eight lines (VIII. 65-72) spoken by the three Kings concern-
the sudden appearance of the star that announces the birth
of Christ.

3. Eight lines (VIII. 145-152) forming the greetings of the
three kings to Herod and the latter’s reply (each speaking two
lines).

4. Four lines (XVI, between 11. 144-145) occurring in some
manuscripts and introducing a speech by Pilate. They are
identical with the first four lines of number 5 in this list,
and are quite obscure, although apparently more appropriate
here than in Play XVIII.

5. Eight lines (XVIII. 1-8), introducing a boastful speech of
Pilate, generally obscure.

The presence of these passages has been accounted for in differ¬
ent ways. Collier believed them evidences that the Chester plays were
originally in French. He says “there could have been no possible
reason for converting them [the speeches] into French, if they had
been originally composed in English or in Latin. They are probably
relics of the most ancient structure, retained in the current tran-

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

scripts.” 1 Others, however, have found an explanation in the fact
that the French language was the language of the upper classes in
England, or had recently been, when the Chester plays were pre¬
sumably written. Since all the French passages are put in the mouths
of kings and magistrates, the French is merely a sign of their
princeship.2 This seems the more reasonable explanation. They
are all but one in the normal aaab stanza of the Cycle and the objec¬
tion that two of the passages are not at the beginning of speeches 3
can be accounted for, if any explanation is needed, by subsequent
revision.

In this connection it should be remembered that the Chester
plays are not alone in containing such passages. In the Coventry
Shearmen and Taylors Play the Nuntius who announces Herod
proclaims his approach in eleven lines of corrupt French.4 In the
Towneley play of The Talents , (XXV), Pilate begins with a stanza
in Latin, continues in four more of mixed Latin and English, and
near the close of his speech dismisses the torturers with a line of
French: “Dew vows [garde], mon senyours.” In the Chester play
of Antichrist, Antichrist announces his arrival in eight lines of Latin.
For princely persons to speak a passage in a language not compre¬
hensible to the vulgar would seem to have been a tradition in the early
drama. It even seems to be alluded to for humorous effect in the
Towneley play (XVI) of Herod when at the end of the play that
mighty monarch says: “Bot adew ! — to the deuyll ! I can no more
Fraunch!” though no part of his speech has been in French. And
this is certainly the intention in York, xxx, 146-7 when Herod
addresses Christ in a mixed French jargon: “Saie! beene venew in
bone fay, Ne plesew et a parle remoy,” and the second miles replies
in effect, “Nay, my lord, he cannot jest.” At all events it seems un¬
safe to argue for a French original from the presence of these
speeches in the Chester plays.

Not much more convincing is the argument based on French
derivatives in the vocabulary of the cycle. Hohlfeld pointed to
“rouge dead carrine” and “grante mercye” (grand merci) as ex¬
amples of actual French words in the plays. But the latter is

‘Collier, Hist, of Eng. Dram. Poetry, 1831, II, 131-2.

a So, for example, Wright, Jusserand, Hemingway, and Utesch

a Hohlfeld, p. 9.

T ‘Craig H., Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, E.E.T.S., Ex. Ser.,
LXXXVII (1902), 16-17.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 45

found in the York plays, as reference to the glossary will show, and
the former seems to be a transcriber’s error in Wright’s edition.1
Deimling prints as the reading of all MSS. “wrong dead carren”
and the Devonshire MS., which Deimling did not see, has “wravge.”
Neither the reading of Wright nor that of Deimling is quite con¬
vincing, but it will not do to argue the question of French influence
on the vocabulary from such an uncertain word. As for carren,
the word proves nothing. It is found in the Ancren Riwle, Cursor
Mundi, Wiclif, and Chaucer. Hohlfeld himself was unwilling to
attach much importance to such supposed Gallicisms since one can
find similar French expressions in all the cycles. Moreover a care¬
ful examination of the Chester text does not show a larger proportion
of French derivatives than is found in the other three collections.
On the whole, the vocabulary does not testify to French influence.
If the Chester plays are the work of an educated cleric, the language
is just what we should expect.

IV.

So far the evidence for French influence on the Chester cycle
has proved rather disappointing, and one might be tempted at this
point in the discussion to think that for years students of the drama
have been jousting with a windmill. This, however, is not quite
the case. Before anyone can deny completely the influence of a
French source he must satisfactorily account for certain facts the
existence of which cannot be questioned. And first in the list stand
two references in the text to France. In the twelfth play the first
Pharisee, after accusing the woman taken in adultery, is minded to
flee post-haste upon reading the inscription Christ has written in
the sand, and does so with the words :

alas ! that I were away,

farr behynde ffraunce! (XII. 251-2)

Later on, in the fourteenth play Judas, having been warned by
Caiaphas not to fail them, assures them of his dependability, adding:

and, would god Almighty,

the kinge of ffraunce may so affye

In his realme or Bareny,

that they were all so trwe. (XIV. 421-4)

‘Wright, I, 55; cf. Deimling edition, p. 61.

46 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

It is perhaps unnecessary to assume that either of these passages
could not have been written in England. The Pharisee is merely
wishing he were at the other end of the world and Judas is making
a sweeping assertion. But the fact remains that France happens
to be used in both cases. France was in the writer’s mind. Had he
been to France? Or did he find these allusions in some source he
was using ? Perhaps we cannot decide ; but at any rate the testimony
of these passages cannot be denied consideration. They may gain,
or lose in significance according to whether or not they receive
support in what follows.

The greater part of the Chester cycle is in substantial agreement
with the other English cycles. It is also in substantial agreement
with most of the French Passions. This is merely equivalent to
saying that the French cycles and the English cycles show a funda¬
mental similarity of structure. If one constructs a table showing
in parallel columns the incidents treated in the English cycles (extant
and lost, so far as the data exist) and the various French collective
mysteries of which texts or detailed abstracts have been published,
he will be impressed with the truth of this statement. When a play
of Noah was performed at York, Wakefield, Chester, N-town, Corn¬
wall, Beverley, Hereford, Newcastle, Norwich, was shown in dumb-
show at Dublin, and forms a part of the Semur Passion , the cycle
in B. N, MS. fr. 904, and the Valenciennes text, the probability is
fairly great that it will occur wherever Old Testament subjects form
an integral part of the treatment. The chief difference between the
collective dramas of France and England is in the slighter attention
paid in the former to episodes preceding the Annunciation. Yet
even here the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain
and Abel, Noah, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and a Prophetce occur with
fair frequency in the dramas of France. Subsequent to the Annun¬
ciation the agreement between French and English cycles is remark¬
ably close. Occasionally, however, an episode found in the French
cycles occurs in only one of the English collections. If that episode
happens to be a favorite one with the French dramatists, its absence
from most English cycles is the more remarkable. Are there such
episodes not found in England outside of the Chester plays, and,
if so, what is their significance for our problem?

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 47

The episodes found in the Chester plays alone among English
cycles are : Abraham and Melchizedek, Balaam and his Ass, the
Fifteen Signs before Judgment, Antichrist, Octavian and the Sibyl,
Healing the Blind at Siloam, and the Cleansing of the Temple. Of
these the first four are of less significance than the others. The
episode of Abraham and Melchizedek dramatizes the scene in Genesis,
XIV, in which Melchizedek greets Abraham with bread and wine
and Abraham offers a tenth of the spoils of war. It is found in the
Mystere du Viel Testament. Likewise the story of Balaam, which
takes the place of a Prophetce in the other English cycles, is drama¬
tized in the Viel Testament. The fifteen Signs before Judgment
are found in the Adam and very briefly in Le Jugement de Dieu,1
while the Antichrist is not represented in the French cycles.

On the other hand, the legend of Octavian and the Sibyl, or the
Conversion of Octavian, is a favorite in the Old French drama.
The version in the Semur Passion 2 may be taken as one of the
oldest. Octavian sends for the Sibyl and, when she has come before
him and paid her respects, asks her whether any man will ever sur¬
pass him in power. She says she will think about it that night and
give him an answer the next day. Thereupon she retires to her
chamber. The following day she reenters and announces to the
Emperor the birth of an infant who will reign in heaven and earth.
The Emperor asks how soon his rule will begin and upon being told
that it will be soon, says he is content and orders preparations made
for the new ruler’s reception. Besides this version, the story is
dramatized at the end of the Viel Testament, in the Arras Passion,
the Rouen Nativity, the two Valenciennes texts, etc. In some of
these plays it is accompanied by the episode of the Temple of Peace
which precedes it in the Chester cycle.

An equally popular feature of the French cycles was the miracle
of Healing the Blind Man at Siloam. In the Chester cycle it is
combined with the Raising of Lazarus to form the thirteenth play.
Typical French versions are those in the Arras Passion (8431 ff.)
and in Greban’s (14071 ff.). All are based on John, IX, but there
are certain interesting features not found in the Biblical narrative.
For example, the Chester episode opens with the blind man begging

‘Petit de Julleville, Les Mysteres, II, 460-1.

‘Edited by Roy, E., Le Mystere de la Passion en France du XIV au XVI
siecle, Dijon, 1903, pp. 58 ff.

48 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

for alms, accompanied by a “puer ducens cacum.” Likewise in
Greban the scene opens with a begging speech by L Aveugle Ne.

Helas ! qui me conffortera?
helas ! et qui m’apportera

quelque povre petite aulmone? . . . (14071-3)

And in the Arras Passion there is the boy who accompanies the
blind man and who asks alms, as in the Chester play :

L’aumosne y est bien employe,

Bonnes gens, pour Dieu donnez lui. (8469-70)

A little later when the Pharisees, after questioning the blind man
as to how he has been healed, despatch a messenger for the man’s
parents in order to identify him, the parents are alarmed:

Mater: Alas! man, what doe we here?

must we afore the pharisies appeare?
a vengeance on them, far and neere!
the neuer did poore man good. . . . (XIII. 162-5)

Similar remarks occur in the French cycles :

La Mere : Helas ! qu’a si noble assemblee

a faire de si povres gens? . . . (Greban, 14374*5)

and in the Arras Passion:

[Pere] : Helas, mon amy, et pour quoy?

Quelque chose n’avons meffait? (8594-5)

When the messenger brings them in he announces them:

here I haue brought, as you badd me, Seigneurs, veez cy par devant vous
these two persons, that aged be; les gens dont vous m’avez charge.1

(XIII. 170-1) (Greban, 14400-1)

Further as a transition between this episode and the next major
theme the Chester plays dramatize, as do the French cycles, the
passage in John, X, 22-40, in which Christ discusses his divinity with
the Jews on the porch of the temple. It is not found in any of the
other English cycles. When at one point the Biblical narrative

1 Noted by Utesch, 42. Utesch is mistaken in saying that the treatment
of this episode in the Chester cycle differs from that in Greban. They are

Suite parallel because both, except for the details noted above, follow the
iiblical narrative with absolute fidelity.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 49

(“Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him’’) requires dra¬
matic adaptation, both the Chester dramatist and Greban develop the
idea in the same way:

help, fellow, and gather stones Concueillez pierres en commune !

and beat him well. . . .

The verbal resemblance is perhaps accidental, but the similar treat¬
ment of the whole episode is suggestive. Finally, we may close this
discussion of special Chester episodes with the Cleansing of the
Temple. The theme is found elsewhere in the drama of England
only in the Cornish plays. But it is significant, like the Octavian-
Sibyl myth and the miracle at Siloam, in being a favorite among
the French dramatists.

Our discussion of these French-Chester resemblances would not
be adequate without a mention of one other detail : the names of the
midwives at the Nativity. In the English cycles except Chester they
are called Salome and Zelumi. Chester agrees with the French cycles
in making the second Zebel (Tebel).1 The name is difficult to ac¬
count for, only Zelumi occurring in the Apocryphal Gospels. It is
found in the Golden Legend and occasionally elsewhere. But what
concerns us here is the fact that it is the form regularly found in
French mysteries and nowhere else in the English drama.

What, now, are we to conclude as to the significance of these
resemblances for the question of French influence? They are hardly
to be dismissed as wholly meaningless. And yet their significance
can be easily overestimated. The Chester plays are not alone in
possessing unique features. Only the Coventry cycle, for example,
treats the Death of Cain, Joachim and Anna, and Mary in the Temple.
The Towneley plays include two treatments of Jacob and an episode
concerning Augustus and Cyrenius. The York cycle contains a
Transfiguration, and an Apparition of Mary to Thomas, not to
mention a Marriage in Cana now lost. These episodes, to be sure,
are in some cases not found in any French cycle now available, and
only one, the Transfiguration, is of frequent occurrence. But they
suffice to warn us of the possibility that we may lay too much stress
on such evidence. It is perhaps fair to say that the Chester plays
depart from the other English cycles more often and agree with the

1 Cf. the Arras Passion, the Nativite de Sainte Genevieve, and Petit de
Julleville, Les Mysteres, II, 237.

50 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

French tradition in more significant features than any other of the
four great cycles.

VI.

The final argument that can be urged for a relation between the
French cycles and the Chester plays is based upon the general plan
of the cycle and the structure of certain plays. Concerning the
former something has already been said. From the Annunciation on
there is a substantial agreement between the French and English
cycles generally. In this part of the sequence there is no subject
commonly treated in the English plays that is not found with equal
frequency in the French collections, except Doomsday and possibly
the Assumption of the Virgin. The same subjects generally consti¬
tute the principal episodes in both. The greater attention paid in
the English cycles to Old Testament material is as characteristic of
the Chester plays as of any of the others. Certainly apart from the
episodes discussed in the preceding section there is no significant
departure in the Chester plays from the plan of English cycles
generally. Even the suggestion that in the grouping of episodes
the Chester plays are more in accordance with French practice should
not be carried too far. Ten Brink observed that the Creation, Fall,
and Cain and Abel are presented in one play ; that the Annunciation,
Visit to Elizabeth, Joseph’s Trouble, and the Birth of Christ are com¬
bined in a single pageant with the play of Octavian and the Sibyl
worked in; and that the whole of the Passion is contained in two
plays.1 It is true that these episodes are generally combined in the
French drama and that if the Chester plays were following French
tradition it would be most natural for them to take their present
form. It must be remembered, however, that the French cycles are
more or less continuous throughout, the only real breaks being be¬
tween the performances of different days. Once again the evidence
is not very conclusive, but what there is leads one to believe French
influence on the general plan possible.

In the management of individual episodes or plays the Chester
cycle at times shows a general parallelism with a given French text
that is unusual and that is not to be duplicated from the other English
cycles. For example, Greban and the Chester dramatist agree closely
in their treatment of the Creation, Fall, and Cain and Abel, all of
‘Ten Brink, II, 275.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 51

which, as just said, are combined in the one Chester play. The
parallelism in the early part of this play is due to the close following
of the Biblical narrative by both dramatists. But even this is sig¬
nificant to the extent that these dramatists remained unusually faith¬
ful to their source where the authors of the other English cycles chose
to depart more or less from it. The latter part of the play, treating
the murder of Abel, shows a similarity of treatment that in places
has no basis in Genesis. It would be desirable if space permitted to
print in parallel columns the whole Chester play and the correspond¬
ing portion of Greban’s Passion. There would be no significant
verbal agreement, at least in the earlier portion, that could not be
traced to the Biblical source. But the succession of events and even
of speeches is in general remarkably alike. Perhaps a quotation or
two may be permitted ; for the rest we shall have to be content with
a synopsis.

Deus Dieu le Pere

I God, most in maiestye
in whom beginning none may be,
endles alsoe, most of postye,

I am and haue bene ever.

Now heaven and earth is made
through me,

the earthe is voyde onely I see,
therefore light, for more lee,
through my crafte I will kever.

At my bydding now made be light!
light is good, I see in sighte;
twynned shalbe throughe my mighte
the lighte from Thestemes.

Light daye, I will, be called aye
and thesternes night, as I say;
thus morrow and even the first day
is made full and expresse.

Now will I make the fyrmament
in myddes the waters to be lent,
for to be a divident
to twyne the waters aye;

Or est temps que nous achevons
nostre operacion grant erre;

ja cree avons ciel et ter re
par limitacion certaine,
mes celle terre est vuide et vaine,
couverte d’eaue tres parfonde,
et tenebrosite habonde
dessus la face des abismes ;
et sur celles eaues meismes
nostre esprit se porte et transffere
par hault et solempnel mistere.

Soit done lumiere devisee

et de tenebres divisee,

la quelle, pour tant que cler luyt,

nomons jour et tenebres nuyt.

Or est fait vespre et matinee
pour nostre premiere journee.

Apres voulons que soit pose
un firmament bien dispose,
divisant les eaues terrestes
contre les haultes et celestes,

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Above the welkin, benethe also,
and heaven yt shall be called oo,
thus commen is even and morrow also
of the seacond daye.

Now will I waters, everichone,
that vnder heaven be great won,
that they gather into one,
and drynes sone him showe.

That drynes earth men shall call,
the gathering of the waters all,
Seas to name have the shall,
thereby men shall them knowe.

Will on earth that hearbes springe,
each one, in kinde seede gevinge,
trees dyvers fruytes forth bringe,

after there kinde, eache one,

The seede of which for aye shall be
within the fruyte of each tree,
thus morrow and even of dayes three
is bothe comen and gone.

Now will I make through my might
lightninge in the welken brighte,
to twyn the day from the nighte
and lighten the earthe with lee.

Greate lightes I will make twoo:
the sonne and eke the mone also,
the sonne for daye to serve for oo,
the mone for nighte to be.

I will make on the fyrmament
Starres also, throughe myne intent,
the earth to lighten there they be
lente ;

and knowne may be there bye

Cowrses of planetts, nothing amisse ;
now se I this worke good, I wisse;
thus morrow and even both made is
the fourthe daye fully.

nomine del pour plaisant sejour,
et plus n’en produyrons ce jour.

Apres voulons que terre appere
et qu’en ung singulier reppere
toute eaue se tire et s’assamble,
et cella bien conjoinct ensemble

sera mer tres bien denommee
et la seche terre nommee ;

terre doncques gouvernera
herbe verde, et produira
arbres, pommiers, pour toujours
rendre

ung chacun fruit selonc son gendre,

ayans semences vertuables,

prestz a engendrer leurs samblables ;

atant est fait soir et matin

et nostre tiers jour traict a fin.

Apres creons ou firmament
deux luminaires noblement,
et soit l’un grand et l’aultre mendre
pour mieulx discemer et comprendre
comment jour de la nuit differe:

le soleil par lumiere clere
au jour esclairier servira,
et la June de nuyt luyra

habondanment accompaignie
d’estoilles a grant compaignie;
or puisque chacune enlumine,

atant nostre quart jour termine.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 53

Now will I in waters fishe forth
bringe,

fowles in the firmament flyinge,
great whalles in the sea swymminge,
all make I with a thoughte.

Beastes, fowles, stone and tree,
thes workes are good, well I see,
therfore to blesse all lykes me
these workes that I have wroughte.

All Beastes, I byd yow multeply
in earth, in water, by and bye,
and, fowles, in ayre for to flye,
the earth to fulfill.

Thus morrow and even through my
might

of the fifte daye and the night
is made and ended well arighte,
all at myne owne will.

Now will I on earth forth bringe
anone

all kindes of beastes, everichon,
that creepen, flye, or els gone,
each one, in his kinde.

Now this is done at my biddinge :
beastes going, flyinge and creeping,
and all my workes at my lyking
fully now I finde.

Now heaven and earth is made ex-
presse. . . .

Apres atant ne nous passons:
produisent eaues les poissons,
ballaines et aultres reptilles
vivant en eaue, et volatilles,
oyseaulx de diverses especes,
a grosses tourbes et espesses,
pour habiter et vie querre
les ungs en mer, aultres en terre ;
et pour tant que bons les tenons,
ceste beneysson leur donnons ;

crescez tous et multipliez
et multiplians rempliez
la mer et terre en habondance,
chacun selonc son ordonnance.

Or est vespre et matin leve
et nostre quint jour acheve.

Et pour nostre oeuvre traire avant

produyse terre ame vivant
en divers gendres bestiaulx,
oeilles, vaches et chevaulx,
jumens et reptilles plusieurs,
deux et deux pour estre plus seurs.

Or est la terre preparee. . . .

(Greban, 467-538)

One more passage may be quoted to show the succession of the
speakers, again remembering that the Bible is the ultimate source
of the resemblance.

Deus Dieu le Pere

Adam, Adam, where art thou? Adam, ou es tu?

Adam

Ah ! lord, I hard thy voyce right
now ;

Helas ! sire,

j’ai ouy ta voix et tes dis

resoner en ce paradis,

dont de peur ne say que je face;

54 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

I am naked, I make a vowe, si me suis musse de ta face,

therfore nowe I hyde me. de honte qu ainsi me voy nu,

Deus

whoe tolde the, Adam, thou naked
was,

Save onelie thyne owne tredpasse,
that of the tree thou eaten hase
that I forbade thee?

J '&£■

Adam

Lord, this woman that is here,
that thou gave me to my fere,
gave me part: I did att her prayer,
of it I did eate.

Deus

Woman, why hast thou done soe?

Eve

This adder, lorde, shee was my foe,
and sothelie deceaved me thoe,
and made me to eate that meate.

Deus

Adder, for that thou hast done this
noye,

among all beastes on earth the bye,
cursed shalt thou be for thye,
for this womans sake.

Vpon thy breast thou shalt goe,
and eate the earth, to and froe,
and enmytie betwixt yow twoo
hence forth I will make.

Betwixt thy seade and hers also
I shall excyte sorrow and woe;
to breake thy heade and be thy foe
she shall have maystry aye.

Dieu le Pere

Et par quoi as tu recongnu
que nu soies en ce pourpris,
si non pour ce que tu as pris
du fruit contre ma volente?

Adam

La femme que tu m’as preste
pour compaignie lateralle
ne m’a pas este bien lealle,
car par elle j’en ay goute.

Dieu le Pere

Et toi, femme, d’aultre coste,
dont as tu la hardiesse eue?

Eve

Sire, le serpent m’a deceue;
c’est par son conseil decevable.

Dieu le Pere

Mauvais serpent et miserable,

par ta perverse abusion
recevras malediction :
de toutes bestes aras pis;

tu te trayneras sur ton pis
tous les jours en mengant la terre.
Si mettray continuel guerre
qui entre femme et toy se tienne

entre sa semence et la tienne,
qui james ne terminera.

La teste te soubzmarchera
et t’espyra de l’esguillion
souvent a ta confusion.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 55

No beast on earth, I the behet,
that man so lyttle shall of let,

And troden be fowle vnder his feete
for thy misdeede to daye.

And, woman, I warne thee wytterlie,
thy mischeife I shall multeply:
with pennaunce, sorrow and great
anoye

thy children shalt thou beare.

And for thou hast done so to daye,
the man shall mayster thee alwaye,
and vnder his power thou shalt be
aye,

thee for to drive and deere.

And man, also, I say to the,
for thou hast not done after me,
thy wifes counsell for to flee,
but done so her bydding,

To eate the fruite of this tree,
in thy worke waryed the earth shalbe,
and in great traveyle behoveth the
on earth to get thy lyving.

When on the earthe traveyled thou
hase,

fruite shall not grow on that place,
but thornes and bryers for thy tre-
space

to the on earth shall spring.

Hearbes and rootes thou shalt eate,
and for thy sustenance sore sweate,
with great mischeife to wyn thy
meat,

nothing to thy lyking.

Thus shalt thou lyve, soth to sayne,
for thou hast bene to me vnbeyne,
ever till tyme thou turne againe
to earthe there thou came froe.

For earth thou art, as well is seene,
and after this world wo and tene
to earth thou shalt, withoutten wene,
and all thy kind also.

Toy, femme, ne seras pas quitte
de ce mal : en peine et labite,
a griefz dueilz et gemissemens,
tu feras tes enfantemens,

et seras en obeyssance
dessoubz l’omme et soubz sa puis¬
sance,

a qui resister n’oseras.

Adam, pour ce qu’obey as

a ta femme et mengie du fruit,
contre ce que t’avoye instruit,

la terre en ton oeuvre interdicte
devendra brehaigne et mauldite;

quanque d’elle recueilleras
a grand labeur et peine aras,
et ne t’advienra pour tous dons
sinon espines et chardons
aucuneffois pour ton salaire.

En la sueur de ton viaire
useras ton pain chacun jour,
jusqu’a temps que faces retour
en la terre dont tu yssi:

car pouldre es, et en pouldre aussi,
te fauldra retourner en fin.

(Greban, 759-812)

56 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The similarity in the treatment of the Cain and Abel story is
more significant because less completely dependent upon the Biblical
narrative. Space permits only of a speech by speech synopsis :

Chester:

Adam

God has given me two sons. I
will acquaint them with the dream
I had while Eve was being created.

I saw that God would come from
Heaven and redeem mankind; that
the world would be destroyed by
water or fire; and that God would
sit in final judgment upon man.

Cain, you shall be a farmer, and
you, Abel, a shepherd.

You shall remember to sacrifice.

Greban:

Adam

We should praise God; he has
given us two sons after our image.

Era

I thank God ; it pleases me to see
them.

Adam

Each must labor in his turn.

Eve

We shall soon have many sheep:
Abel takes pleasure in tending them.

Adam

Cain labors well and has good
crops.

My sons, God is generous to you;
it would be wrong not to render
sacrifice.

Era

Through my disobedience I now
suffer and spin.

Cain

I have much grain: 1 will sacri¬
fice some to God and see if he zvill
send me more because of it.

Abel

I will sacrifice a beast; none is too
good for God.

Abel

I am ready to offer the best I
have.

Cain

I have abundance of sheaves: I
will sacrifice one.

Abel

Let us sacrifice together and not
delay.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 5 7

Adam

You should offer the best ; then
God will consume it with eager
flame.

Cain

I am the older ; I will sacrifice first.

It were pity to burn good corn; I
will burn this that has been eaten
by beasts and this that grew by the
way.

Lo, God, I offer this; I hope thou
wilt send me more worldly btiss.

Abel

Receive, Lord, my present, — the
best beast in my flock.

Lo, it is accepted: a flame from
heaven has devoured it.

Abel

Your advice is good. The fire
is ready. I will prepare a lamb.

Cain

I shall select the poorest sheaf ;
it is a pity to waste a good one.

Abel

Lord, with pure intent, I present
this lamb; accept it gladly and grant
me grace to do thy will.

Cain

Receive, Lord, my sacrifice and may
it profit me in this present life.

Abel

It is time I put my sheep in the
flame.

Cain

I will also put my sheaf in it.

Abel

I see my offering is accepted for
the smoke rises straight to heaven.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Cain

Out ! Alas ! God takes his and re¬
fuses mine. I am sore ashamed and
envious.

Haro! Mine goes to the contrary.
Never such shame came or will come
to me. My brother is preferred to
me.

Deus

Dieu

Cain, why are you angry? Do you
not know that if you do good you
will be rewarded, and if you do ill
you will fare ill.

Cain, you are downcast. Do you
not know that if you do good you
will have good, and if you do ill
you will be punished?

Cain, you will come to grief if
you pursue your inclination. Advise
thee; thy brother shalt be obedient.

If your inclination is evil, you have
reason to control it.

Cain

Nothing prevents me from doing
my will ; my heart could not be
more grieved.

Abel

How are you, Cain? You seem
dej ected.

Cain

So be it: brother, come with me
into yonder field.

Abel, brother, let us go to the fields
to relieve my anxiety.

Abel

Brother, thou art older. I gladly
obey.

Brother, anything that will please
you shall be done.

Cain

Nothing will please me but that
we go to the fields.

Abel

Let us go, then.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 59

Cain Cain

Say, thou caitiff, thinkest thou to
pass me in renown ? God has re¬
proved me because of thee. Thou
shalt pay for it full dearly ere thou
goest away. Never shalt thou have
much grace again. Thou shalt die
this night, tho God stood in this
place.

Ah, wicked villain, are you not un¬
fortunate that God has honored you
more than me? Thou shalt pay for
it. Never shall you eat bread again,
now that I have you.

Abel

Alas, brother, mercy! Do not kill
me.

Cain

You shall not escape.

Abel

Alas, brother, mercy!

Cain

I shall return you livid and black.

Abel

Alas, brother, mercy! Do not kill
me.

( Cain kills him).

Ah, Lord, have pity on my soul.

Cain

He is dead. My father will have
great grief. I care not.

Deus

Dieu

Cain, where is thy brother, Abel?

Cain, where is thy brother?

Cain

I don’t know. I am not his keeper.

I don’t know. Am I his keeper?

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Deus Dieu

What hast thou done, thou wicked
man ? Thy brother’s blood cries to
me from earth for vengeance.

- Wicked man, what hast thou done ?
The blood of thy brother cries to me
for vengeance, from the earth where
thou hast shed it.

Thou shalt be cursed for this
wickedness. Thy work shall be
profitless. Men shall hate thee.

Thou shalt be cursed and a fugi¬
tive on the earth for this wicked
deed. Thou shalt labor in vain.

Cain

Out, alas ! I am in sorrow on
every side for my folly. My sin is
so horrible that I am unworthy of
forgiveness. Wherever I go men
will slay me.

I know my iniquity passes forgive¬
ness. I am cursed. All who see
me will kill me, — and rightly.

Deus

Dieu

No, Cain, whoso kills thee will be
punished sevenfold.

Not so. Whoever kills thee will be
punished sevenfold.

Thou and thy children shall suffer
unto the seventh generation.

Cain

Alas, what sign shall I have?

Cain

Dieu

On your forehead this shall be a
sign.

Cain

Out ! alas 1 I am damned. I shall
wander from place to place, cursed
of men I shall go to my sire and
dame.

All will know it. I shall wander
without rest or respite.

[16-line dialogue between Lucifer
and devils over Abel’s soul.]

Adam

Our sons are late.

Eve

I fear mischance. Cain quarreled
with his brother recently.

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 61

Adam

So I fear. Let us go seek them.

Eve

Father and mother, I have slain
Abel in strife.

Alas, Abel lies dead. I shall never
have pleasure or comfort in anything.

Adam

Alas, Abel is dead. I have no more
joy save Eve.

Is it Abel who lies here dead ?
Sweet God, now am I undone.

Eve

Alas, my son is stain. I shall never
feel anything but woe and mourning.

It is Abel, your son. Alas, now has
come the evil I have feared all my
life.

Adam

Ah, Cain, to murder thy poor
brother ! Thou art cursed of God.

It is punishment for my sin.

Eve

Ah, horrible serpent, you are the
cause of our banishment from para¬
dise and the death of our son.

Adam

God will comfort you. Let us bury
Abel.

Eve

Since it is God’s will, I see no other
remedy.

Cain

Farewell ! I will flee. I shall never
thrive.

Now I know I shall never be wel¬
come anywhere I go.

Now I goe, to all that I see,

I graunt the same gifte.

le randiray tant tout par tout
oue j’aray ung peu de repos.

(Icy s’en va a l’adventure.)

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

In this synopsis certain points are to be noted. First, Adam and
Eve participate in the treatment whereas they do not in the York
and Towneley versions. Only in the Ludus Coventria does even
Adam appear and that is in a brief passage at the beginning of the
play. Secondly the features italicized in the above epitome are not
based upon anything in the Bible text.1 Such are (i) Cain’s state¬
ment that he has abundant grain ; (2) that it would be a pity to burn
good corn; (3) the hope he expresses for worldly benefit from his
tithe; (4) the visible sign that the offering of Abel is accepted; (5)
Cain’s expression of shame and envy; (6) his diatribe against Abel
stressing in each case three points : Abel has surpassed him in re¬
nown; he shall pay; he shall die; and finally (7) the lamentation of
Adam and Eve, including Eve’s blaming it all on her original trans¬
gression. In the features enumerated stress is to be laid not on
chance verbal resemblances in the text but on the ideas and motives
involved. In occasional passages the Vie l Testament is even closer
to the Chester plays than Greban,2 but such additional resemblances
only serve to further illustrate the French tradition. It is difficult to
escape the feeling that in the general management of certain scenes
and episodes, the structure of individual plays, lies the strongest
reason, however strong that may be, for assuming the presence of
French influence in the Chester cycle.

In the present discussion an effort has been made to examine the
evidence impartially and to avoid starting with a conviction and trying
to establish it. Even now I should be the last to assume that the
question had been settled by this examination. I do not think French

. 19,n thfr theme in general, see Emerson, O. F„ “Legends of Cain, Especially

in Old and Middle English,” PMLA, XXI (1906), 831-929.

An illustration is Cain s invitation to Abel to accompany him to the fields
The form which this takes in the Chester play is closely paralleled by the
same speech Jn the Viet Testament, which corresponds more closely to the
English version than Greban does and much more so than any of the other
English cycles. York is defective at this point (two leaves of the MS. are
missing). Towneley and the Ludus Coventrice have no such speech; Cain
s‘ays ,Abe' ,on the spot. So, too, does he in the narrative version in the Cursor
Munai. I he Vt el Testament agrees with the Chester passage in the reason
given for going, in the tone of the request, and even verbally :

come forth, brother, with me thou
mvste goe*

into the fetid a lyttle here froe,

I haue an Arend to saye.

II fault aller

Ung peu aux champs et entre nous
De noz necessitez parler.

(* th°u mvste goe is the reading of three MSS.)

THE CHESTER PLAYS AND FRENCH INFLUENCE 63

influence has been "proved'7 ; I merely consider it probable. Briefly,
it seems most in accordance with the evidence to believe that some¬
where in the development of the Chester cycle the influence of the
French dramatic tradition was felt.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY

George B. Churchill
Professor of English Literature, Amherst College

O the student of English society in the Restoration period, as

to the student of the dramatic art, the plays of William

“ Wycherley offer a material of peculiar interest and value.
When Wycherley’s first comedy was presented, a decade had passed
since the restoration of the monarchy and the reopening of the
theaters. The advent of Charles II had brought to England a court
deeply inoculated with French manners and French standards of life.
The ordered elegance of French society had captivated the English¬
man of Charles’s train, and he introduced it, at least as an ideal,
into England, when he had once more a court of his own. But there
were some things both in his own nature and in that of the French¬
man of which he was not fully aware. He did not realize that social
satisfactions could never conquer or suppress the clamor of his nature
for the satisfactions of the individual. It is extremely doubtful if
the Englishman of Charles’s court ever had any clear vision of
society as an organization whose laws profoundly modify the norms
and standards of the individual, an organization whose demands not
seldom rise into a sphere where the common sense and the social
judgment become almost, if not quite, a moral law.

By the beginning of the seventies it was plain how far the
admiration of the English court for what was French had gone in
the way of actual assimilation, and how far it remained truly Eng¬
lish. It was a society highly self-conscious and interested in nothing
so much as itself. Certain very definite ideals of social intercourse,
the admiration of witty converse, of fidelity to social conventions,
of savair-znvre, the love of ease and gaiety and glitter, testify to the
lasting influence of France. But it had already proved to itself, and
more, it had come to protest openly with a certain satisfaction, that
it was not French. It had not only largely cast off the imitation
of externals — so that a Monsieur de Paris had become a ridiculous

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

figure, the butt of society and of comedy; it had flung away all the
trammels of elegant speech and conduct, and revealed and flaunted
the unashamed vulgarity of the Englishman given over to the pursuit
of sensual gratification. “ Tis too bold for the French manners,”
wrote Voltaire of Wycherley’s Country Wife. An audacious shame¬
lessness is the characteristic that in 1671 chiefly distinguished the
court of Charles from that of Louis XIV.

The development of an adequate self-expression in the drama,
the establishment of a new comedy, was a process coincident in time
with that by which English society had “found” itself. It was sub¬
ject to the same influences and reached the same goal. As English
society found its inspiration and model in French society, only to
discover eventually that the ideal was wholly unfitted to its own true
nature, so the Restoration comedy sought its model in the work of
Moliere, only to discover that the standards and purposes of Moliere
were quite different from its own. By 1668, in Etheredge’s She
Would If She Could , apart from some borrowing of material, and
inspiration of the animation and ease of scene and dialogue, the
influence of Moliere is confined to the conception of a comedy whose
sufficient subject and interest is “manners,” the behavior of society
as it is. Etheredge had no standards, social or moral, that differed
from those of the society he portrayed. He had no share in Moliere’s
conception of the sanative, rationalizing, ordering values of right
social standards. “It is a heartless world he presents, and he laughs
with an entire acquiescence in its point of view.” 1

The work of William Wycherley was subject to the same influ¬
ences as those which molded the work of Etheredge. Like the latter,
he had spent some years in France, and through his connection with
the circle of the Hotel de Rambouillet had become acquainted with
the best that French society had to offer. He had had the oppor¬
tunity to see the production of some of Moliere’s earlier work, and
had made a close study of the Frenchman’s later plays. He had
shared intimately the life of the English court. But when in 1673
and 1675-6 2 he produced The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer,
he presented a portrait and expression of English society in certain

’ ^acaulay, “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.”

4 o. °r • e f°r these dates, see the introduction to the author’s

forthcoming edition of Wycherley’s plays, from which, with the permission

°s drawn ? ’ Heath & c°" m“ch of °f ’this’paper

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 67

respects markedly different from that of Etheredge, and revealed
a markedly different use of the work of his French model.

It is the chief distinction of Wycherley that he of all the writers
of Restoration comedy most accurately and most fully expressed the
society for which he wrote. What was French, what was English
in his world, is plainest in his comedies. If his dialogue lacks the
grace, the sustained ease of wit that is to be found in Congreve’s,
it is a more faithful presentation of what was to be heard in the
fashionable circle of his day; if corruption is nakeder and more
shameless in his plays than in any others, it is because he was truer
to the fact. It is an English sensual society that he depicts, along
with what it had really acquired and retained from the influence of
France. And it is to be added that he came nearer than any other
to a real comprehension of the French social ideal, especially as that
is revealed in the plays of Moliere. More than this, Wycherley,
alone among the comic playwrights of the Restoration, appears to
have had some notion — vague and even grotesque as it was — of the
true fruit of a genuine social consciousness ; and alone among his
fellows in the midst of his unsparing realism made some attempt to
depict ideal characters that should express the common sense and
controlled judgment, the passion for sincerity, the faithfulness of
love, which must have lurked somewhere, if only as a vision of
despair, in that society which we are perhaps too ready to call utterly
corrupt.

That The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer are portraits and
criticisms of English society is apparent at a glance. In what re¬
spects does Wycherley’s portrait differ from that drawn by his
fellows? In what respects does he differ from them in his attitude
toward what he sees? That The Country Wife is to a certain extent
an imitation and adaptation of Moliere’s UPcole des Femmes and
L’Pcole des Maris, and The Plain Dealer of Le Misanthrope, is
equally apparent. What is the degree and the nature of this
dependence ?

To these questions very various answers have been given.
Macaulay,1 too obsessed by his moral thesis for either a careful eye
to facts or a calm critical analysis, declared that Wycherley “has
scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is not too much
to say that there is hardly anything of the least value in his plays

1 “The Comic Dramatists.”

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

of which the hint is not to be found elsewhere.’ Hazlitt 1 is as
bluntly on the other side: “the best things are his own.” Both
critics confused the question of originality with that of moral and
dramatic values. Modern critics have had a surer view. Of The
Plain Dealer, W. C. Ward 2 declares that it “appears almost equally
a masterpiece of originality as of ingenuity,” and A. W. Ward 3
that Wycherley must in this play be allowed to have given proofs
of genuine force and of essential originality. ... To no other of
his dramatic works can a similar praise be given.” Schelling’s 4
judgment contains a clearer indication of the nature and value of
this originality. “Wycherley was as frank a plagiary as any of his
contemporaries ... his Country Wife . . . derives its plot from
the popular comedies of Moliere. The Plain Dealer . . . however
it may have been suggested by certain scenes and personages of Le
Misanthrope, was certainly made over by the English dramatist into
something new and distinctive. . . . The thing which raises Wycher¬
ley above his class, strange as it may appear, is a certain moral
earnestness which . . . causes the careful reader to discern in all this
brutality and plain speaking not a little of the gravity of true satire.”

In this paper I purpose to consider once more the question of
Wycherley’s originality, and offer a contribution in such detail as
its necessarily narrow limits will allow toward a more nearly complete
answer than has yet been given. There are two distinct questions
involved: In what and in what degree is Wycherley original? and
What is his originality worth ? These questions must be settled apart
from each other.

In the two Pcoles of Moliere the basic idea is the same. In each
an old bachelor brings up a young ward with the intent that she shall
become his wife. Each guardian distrusts the world and keeps his
ward far from it, in the determination that she shall be safe from
:ts seductions, and deliberately refuses her an education, that igno¬
rance may prevent her from learning how to deceive him. But youth
and age will not together, compulsion awakens the desire for free¬
dom, a youthful, romantic lover calls to the heart of each girl, and
each, the one through a series of happy chances, the other by “the

Lectures on the English Conuc Writers, 3rd ed., p.
t Wycherley (Mermaid Series), p. 365.

°f En9lish Dramatic Literature, II, 466.
r. E. Schelling, English Drama, pp. 263, 264.

149.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 69

adroit stratagem of an innocent love,” escapes from her bonds to
the arms of the loved one.

In The Country Wife is told what is in many respects a com¬
bination and adaptation of the stories of these two plays. An old
bachelor marries his ward, an ignorant country girl, and is forced
by circumstances, much against his will, to bring her to town, where
by a series of chances and by the girl’s own bold abandon and strata¬
gems she becomes the mistress of a town lover. The main lines of
the story are the same in Wycherley and Moliere ; and the resem¬
blance is increased by the fact that Margery, in The Country Wife ,
like Isabelle in L’£cole des Maris, cunningly induces her guardian
to become the bearer of a love-letter to her lover, and finally accom¬
plishes her desire by pretending that the amour is not her own but
her sister’s. It is perfectly clear, therefore, that Wycherley’s play
has borrowed its basic idea and a few incidents from the two plays
of Moliere,

But striking as are the resemblances, not less striking are the
differences. In the plays of the French author the lovers are sin¬
cerely and romantically in love with the heroines, whom they wish
to marry. The guardians are men with whose theory of life and
marriage we disagree : but they are honorable and clean, their knowl¬
edge of the world’s faults has been gained by observation, not by
practice; though we wish to see them defeated, we sympathize with
them in their loss. The heroines are both attractive figures. Agnes
wins us by her simple, tender innocence; Isabelle, who reminds us
not too distantly of some of Shakespeare’s heroines, gains our admi¬
ration by the intelligent energy with which, secure in the purity of
her desires, she forces her way through the bonds of convention to
the wished-for end. All these characters deserve and have our
sympathy.

Of Wycherley’s characters no one has any claim upon our hearts.
The lover is a lustful monster, preying successfully by a disgusting
ruse upon the world of women. The guardian, who is at the same
time husband, is an ancient rake, pursuing in his marriage the same
end as in his former amours, a selfish pleasure. His aims are in no
respect different from the lover’s ; he is merely bent upon winning on
both sides of the game. His goal is to keep his own wife to himself
though he has made prey of other men’s wives. As for the heroine,
Margery, she is ignorant, but not innocent. Her aim is as surely as

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

her husband’s a selfish pleasure, her end adultery. She has no shadow
of the tender romanticism of Agnes, none of the intelligence of Isa¬
belle. Her stratagems are mostly supplied by another, and what is
chiefly striking in that which she originates is her determination to
abandon herself. We feel that Agnes and Isabelle must succeed
because a pure and natural love cannot in the ideal scheme of things
be defeated ; Margery cannot fail to gain her end because in Wycher¬
ley’s world no inexperience can prevent the woman who is bound to
throw herself away.

Our interest in the intrigue is therefore wholly intellectual. Since
they are playing a game upon precisely the same terms, we enjoy
seeing Horner defeat Pinchwife, not because the former deserves to
win, but because the latter deserves to lose. We are tickled by Mar¬
gery’s successful deception of her husband, because it is truly comic
that experienced selfishness should be defeated by selfishness that is
without experience.

It is clear that there is an essential difference between the aim of
Moliere and that of Wycherley. It is Wycherley’s thesis, like
Moliere’s, that human nature is not to be defeated by the unnatural,
that the call of life is bound to be heard in any seclusion and beyond
all walls, that the world’s contamination cannot be prevented by an
enforced ignorance. But Moliere works out this thesis by dramatic
situations which show innocent and untaught human nature escaping
from unnatural bonds to its like, or the same innocence, uncon¬
strained and acquiring experience, as in the case of Leonor, recog¬
nizing its like by means of its experience. Wycherley works out the
thesis in the form of vicious human nature constrained by vice, and
escaping surely to its counterpart as chosen by itself.

The figure of Alithea, it is true, is plainly modeled upon that of
Leonor in L’£cole des Maris. Each is the woman of experience in
the ways of the world, contrasted with the ignorant and imprisoned
heroine. Each is meant to show in the results of her conduct the
salutary effect of freedom upon a wise and clear-judging intelligence.
There is similarity in Leonor ’s criticism of Sganarelle’s attitude
toward Isabelle and Alithea’s criticism of Pinchwife’s treatment of
Margery. And Alithea and Leonor are the passive instruments of
almost the same stratagem on the part of the heroines of the two
plays.

But the contrast is far more clearly and precisely drawn, and the

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 71

lesson more successfully taught, by Moliere than by Wycherley. In
L’Fcole des Maris Isabelle is lost to Sganarelle by his stupid con¬
straint, Leonor gained by Ariste through the experience resulting
from the wise freedom which he allows her. In Wycherley’s play
Alithea has no guardian whose treatment is contrasted with Pinch-
wife’s. She has two lovers, and the utter lack of jealousy in the first,
Sparkish, is contrasted with Pinchwife’s jealousy. But Sparkish’s
conduct is not that of a wise man but that of a pin-headed fool.
Alithea’s fidelity to him is wholly unsatisfactory; for while, as
Krause suggests,1 it may be more admirable to be faithful to a fool
than to an old man of character and wisdom, the bond between
Alithea and Sparkish is no compliment to her intelligence. The
second lover, Harcourt, on the other hand, is neither sufficiently
distinguished in his life nor sufficiently elevated in his character to
serve as a satisfactory ideal compensation for Alithea’s conduct. In
Alithea, then, Wycherley, in imitation of Moliere, attempts an ideal
character, and fails of success because his knowledge of English
society prevents his getting far from realism. The union of Leonor
and Ariste, “romantic” as it is, was doubtless not impossible in
French society. Wycherley’s failure to satisfy the modern romantic
sense need not be ascribed to his “nihilistic cynicism” regarding
women, but to the constraint laid upon him by his knowledge of life.
In the society of his day a Harcourt was probably the most an
Alithea could expect to win.

Of verbal imitations and borrowings from Moliere there are
striking examples. It is their character, and not their number, that
makes them striking: they are mostly apothegms, maxims of conduct,
reflections on life. If an occasional brilliance would be lost by their
omission, there would be no disappearance of any essential touch in
characterization, plot or dialogue.

In view of the similarities of purpose and situation their number
is surprisingly small. It is, in fact, a distinguishing characteristic
of Wycherley’s method that there is comparatively little verbal imita¬
tion where it would be most expected, in the dialogue of imitated
situations. An excellent example is scene 2, Act IV, of The Country
Wife, where Pinchwife questions Margery about her conduct with
her gallant, as Arnolphe questions Agnes in Act II, scene 5, of
L’Fcole des Femmes. Here each guardian is on tenter-hooks lest

1 Wycherley und seine Franzdsischen Quellen, p. 20.

72 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

his examination discover the very worst. In the scene of the French
play the suspense is worked up to a climax prolonged through many
lines by the hesitation of Agnes to reveal what in the conduct of her
lover she fears her guardian will most dislike. The situation is pre¬
cisely the same in Wycherley’s scene. There is the same suspense
and climax, hanging as in Moliere’s dialogue upon a single word;
but in Wycherley the climax is over in three lines. Dramatically the
work of Moliere is far more effective ; no considerations of decency
restrained Wycherley, for there is less periphrasis in his dialogue
than in Moliere’s ; and one is almost forced to the conclusion that an
author’s self-respect restrained the English playwright in the degree
of his imitation. There are but one or two verbal imitations ; and so
unlike are the characters and the circumstances of the lovers, in spite
of the likeness in the situation, that the two scenes have a very dif¬
ferent aspect and atmosphere. Both in its likeness to the original and
in its variation from it, this scene is typical of Wycherley’s method.

What Wycherley borrowed, then, for the plot of The Country
Wife, the basic idea and a very few incidents, was so skilfully varied
by his invention and setting, by characterization and dialogue, that
little remains to which he did not give a thorough impress of his own,
little of which we are tempted to say, this is Moliere, not Wycherley.
Homer and his crew, Lady Fidget and her coterie of women, Spar-
kish, in most of his attributes, are Wycherley’s own ; Pinchwife and
Margery are likewise wholly Wycherley’s so far as their characters
are concerned. Alithea and Lucy, the maid, are the only characters
for whom we cannot claim originality ; and the former, as we have
seen, is sufficiently distinguished from Moliere’s Leonor by the feebler
lines with which she is drawn, while the latter is given a larger place
in the action than is taken by Moliere’s Lisette.

In the conduct of the plot Wycherley’s play is superior to
Moliere’s, as Voltaire unhesitatingly declared: “The English writer
has corrected the only defect that is in Moliere’s Comedy ( L’Fcole
des Femmes), the Thinness of the Plot, which also is so dispos’d
that the characters in it do not enough raise our Concern.” 1
Moliere’s plot is thin because the actual conduct of the intrigue
between Agnes and Horace is carried on behind the scenes, and
because there is no intrigue at all in the story of Leonor. In action
for its own sake the French playwright was not interested, but only
1 Letters Concerning the English Nation, p. 182.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 73

as it developed his dramatic thesis and revealed his characters.
Wycherley’s audience loved abundant movement and demanded com¬
plicated intrigue. In his play, hampered by no stage conventions or
considerations of decency, nearly the whole Horner-Margery-Pinch-
wife intrigue is placed upon the stage, stopping barely short of the
last, impossible detail. To this is added the contest of Harcourt and
Sparkish for the hand of Alithea, and, still further, the intrigue of
Horner with Lady Fidget and her friends. From the beginning to
the end, interest is constantly renewed by the ever-recurring situations
full of dramatic suspense, and their ingenious solutions.

In The Plain Dealer Wycherley again found his theme and the
groundwork of his chief characters in Moliere. They are borrowed
from Le Misanthrope , which has been a mine for many other writers
of English comedy, including Shadwell, Congreve, and Sheridan. In
this instance the borrowings are even plainer and larger in amount
than in The Country Wife. Manly is, of course, Alceste, “natural¬
ised in England.” Both heroes are at war with the hypocrisies and
conventionalities of the world, hate all men as false and wicked or
as compliers with wickedness, and have dedicated themselves to the
other extreme, of “plain dealing.” This is not only openness and
honesty of speech, but an eccentricity of attitude carried so far that
they would be sorry to appear rational in the eyes of the world, and
desire rather to fly from it to a “wilderness” or “the Indies.” To
each hero is attached a companion, Philinte, Freeman, who do not
hate men because they are faulty, who are “compliers with the age”
and preach compliance. Each hero is restrained from rushing into
solitude by the fact that he is weak enough to be infatuated with a
woman, Celimene, Olivia, a coquette or worse, who eventually plays
him false. Each of these in turn is provided with a contrast, fdiante,
Eliza, whose role is to furnish a medium between the two extremes,
a rational attitude toward life, which finds it possible to enjoy the
world without either wickedness or misanthropy.

There are further likenesses in the minor characters. The Novel
of the English play is in some respects, including his name, modeled
upon Acaste, who describes himself (Le Misanthrope, III, 1, 15, et
seq.) as follows:

Pour de l’esprit, j’en ai sans doute, et du bon gout
A juger sans etude et raisonner de tout,

A faire aux nouveautes, dont je suis idolatre,

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Figure de savant sur les bancs du theatre,

Y decider en chef, et faire du fracas
A tous les beaux endroits qui meritent des has.

So Novel is described by Olivia (P. D., II, i) as one “who affects
novelty as much as the fashion . . . who likes nothing but what is
new,” who is “a friend to all [plays] that are new,” and who thinks
that “the new plays wou’d not be the worse for my [his] advice”
(II, i). Novel also plays the part of Acaste in the detraction scene
(P. D., II, i ; L. M., II, 4) and the letter scene (P. D., IV, 2 ; L. M.,

V, 4). Plausible corresponds to Oronte in his “ceremony and great
professing” of friendship for Manly (P. D., I, 1 ; L. M., I, 2) : else¬
where he plays the part of Clitandre in the detraction scene and, as
the wooer of Olivia, in the letter scene.

Moliere’s prude, Arsinoe, rival and foe of Celimene, does not
appear in Wycherley, and Fliante’s role as the sincere friend of the
hero, to whom the latter turns when Celimene proves false, is taken
by Fidelia, a character of a wholly different sort. Her disguise and
her devotion to Manly make it evident that she is a borrowing from
the Viola of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, though the actions through
which she is forced leave her nothing of the delicacy of Viola, and
little of her strength. The relations of Olivia to Manly and Fidelia
show that Olivia’s name, at least, is likewise borrowed from Twelfth
Night.

The Widow Blackacre seems also to have been suggested to
Wycherley. Hunt thought her “an original which he had doubtless
met with in the courts of law,” 1 but most others have found her
source in the Comtesse de Pimbesche of Racine’s Les Plaideurs.

W. C. Ward attempts an explanation of “this supposed discovery of
a non-existent coincidence,” 2 but there are sufficient points of re¬
semblance, both in idea and detail, which lack of space forbids us
here to record, to justify the conclusion that the Widow is another
example of Wycherley’s common method in handling the figures that
he borrowed from French comedy. The basic idea of the character
is adopted ; but in manner, dialogue and intrigue it is so transformed
that it becomes both English and Wycherley’s own.

That there should be likenesses in the plots of The Plain Dealer
and Le Misanthrope, is, since there are such imitations in the charac-

1 Wycherley , Congreve, etc., 1851, p. xvii.

* Wycherley (Mermaid Series), p. 366.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 75

ters and the theme, most natural. The large features in which the
two plots resemble each other are the disappointment of each lover
in his mistress and his failure to recognize his true friends. But here
the plays part company, for Manly is rewarded by the hand of his
faithful friend Fidelia, in union with whom he is made happy, while
Alceste is left in disappointed loneliness. How far the action of Le
Misanthrope is borrowed by Wycherley may be most clearly indicated
by a comparison of scenes. The visit and attitude of Lord Plausihle
in Act I, scene 1, of The Plain Dealer are borrowed from those of
Oronte in Le Misanthrope, I, 2. Plausible is not a sonneteer, to be
sure, but this part of Oronte’s role is carried out in Freeman’s later
remark (P. D.x I, 1), “And I shou’d tell the scribler of honour, that
heraldry were a prettier and fitter study for so fine a gentleman than
poetry?” and Manly’s “the noble sonneteer wou’d trouble thee no
more with his madrigals.” More direct even than this is Manly’s
reference ( P . D., Ill, 1) to his quarrel with a poet whom he has
advised “to leave off writing, and turn lawyer, because he is dull and
impudent, and sayes or writes nothing now but by precedent.”

Manly’s discussion with Freeman in Act I, scene 1, is a direct
imitation of Moliere’s first scene, in general conception and move¬
ment, in some details and in a few verbal borrowings. As Alceste
rejects Philinte as a friend, so Manly rejects Freeman. Each is
thoroughly opposed to his companion’s compliant attitude toward the
world, and declaims against it. Each discusses with his companion
the proper conduct to maintain in a series of hypothetical social
situations suggested by the latter. But Wycherley develops and
extends Moliere’s scene, and there are very significant differences,
which are discussed below. At the close of the scene Manly and
Freeman discuss the former’s attitude toward his mistress, whose
fidelity Freeman distrusts. This is an imitation of Le Misanthrope,
I, 1, 205 et seq., where there is a like discussion of Alceste and
Philinte over Celimene. Again there are significant differences, and
notably in the introduction of Manly’s male friend, Vernish, who is
later to play an important part in the intrigue.

In Act II, scene 1, the famous detraction scene is, again, a direct
imitation of Le Misanthrope, II, 4. Olivia and her friends Plausible
and Novel exercise their satirical wit upon their acquaintances, as do
Celimene and the marquises, and at the end Manly, like Alceste,
becomes the object of the satire. The resemblance in the manage-

76 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

ment of the scenes is close, but the details of the criticism differ,
save that Mrs. Grideline is adapted from Belise.

The genera! design of Plain Dealer, IV, 2, is borrowed from Le
Misanthrope, III, i, and V, 4. In the former scene Clitandre and
Acaste, rivals for the love of Celimene, satirize the pretensions of
each other. Acaste describes his own good points, Clitandre, with
self-satisfied irony, hints that the other is deceived. In V, 4, each
brings to Celimene a letter which he has received from her, encour¬
aging himself and contemning the other. They have compared notes,
and now read their letters aloud to Celimene and her companions,
and having thus made known her falsity, abandon their suit. These
two scenes Wycherley condenses into one. Clitandre’s part is de¬
veloped, for Plausible as well as Novel recounts the good points that
Olivia has praised in him. They show each other the encouraging
letters they have received from Olivia, and find them — a device of
Wycherley’s own — to be exactly the same. There are a few verbal
resemblances.

In Act II, scene 1, Wycherley has introduced a critique of The
Country Wife which follows in idea and general manner scene 3 of
Moliere's La Critique de L’Lcole des Femmes. In Wycherley’s
Olivia takes the part of Climene, while Eliza represents not only
Moliere’s filise, but in some of her remarks Uranie as well. The
scene is condensed, and direct transfer of detail is in general avoided,
but there are some verbal borrowings. Olivia’s speech is, in con¬
sonance with Wycherley’s conception of her character, far coarser
than Climene’s.

In all this comparison of Wycherley’s play with its sources,
emphasis has thus far been laid upon the imitations and resemblances.
The total amount of his borrowings and adaptations is manifestly
large, and to others is due the inception of some of Wycherley’s
most effective scenes. It is not so easy to show by analysis, but it is
perfectly evident to even the casual reader of the plays, that in spite
of this dependence the influence of sources is completely subordinate
to Wycherley’s own work. Even those scenes and characters in which
the dependence is greatest have scarcely for a moment the air of the
original. To everything Wycherley has given his own impress, and
so strong and so individual is this that commentators and editors have
often been led into incautiously minimizing statements as to the
author’s indebtedness to others. Ward’s statement, already quoted

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 77

in part, is not too strong, that “It is almost a truism that the most
original writers are frequently the most extensive plagiarists, and
Wycherley has so overlaid his appropriations with the coloring of his
own brilliant individuality, that his play appears almost equally a
masterpiece of originality as of ingenuity.” 1

What is the nature of this originality? Wherein does it lie?
In every branch of dramatic construction, in characterization, in plot,
in situation, in dialogue, in “manners.” It is, in the first place,
because Wycherley’s originality is constant throughout the play that
even after a thorough perception of his relation to Moliere one can
not, in reading the play, dwell upon that relation.

That the characters of Wycherley are original has to be conceded
even by those who have most strongly denied him originality. The
best example of this concession, made somewhat unconsciously
though it is, is the famous attack of Macaulay. “The only thing
original about Wycherley,” he writes, “the only thing which he could
furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profli¬
gacy. It is curious to observe how everything that he touched, how¬
ever pure and noble, took in an instant the colour of his own mind.
. . . The character of Manly is the best illustration of our meaning.
Moliere exhibited in his misanthrope a pure and noble mind which
had been sorely vexed by the sight of perfidy and malevolence dis¬
guised under the forms of politeness. . . . He is often to blame ; he
is often ridiculous : but he is always a good man. . . . Wycherley
borrowed Alceste, and turned him — we quote the words of so lenient
a critic as Mr. Leigh Hunt — into ‘a ferocious sensualist, who believed
himself as great a rascal as he thought everybody else.’ The surliness
of Moliere’s hero is copied and caricatured. But the most nauseous
libertinism and the most dastardly fraud are substituted for the
purity and integrity of the original.” 2 If all this is granted, it yet
makes clear that Manly is something far different from Alceste. It
is only in their fundamental attitude toward the world that the two
characters are alike ; in the attributes that make them individuals
they are far asunder. It is a difference that goes beyond “the dif¬
ference between the two societies and the two countries.” 3 It is the
force, the savage brutality, the “nauseous libertinism” of Manly that

1 Wycherley (Mermaid Series), p. 365.

’ “The Comic Dramatists.”

*Taine, History of Eng. Lit., trans. Van Laun, I, 486.

78 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

make him original and unique. He is as unworthy as you please;
but he holds one breathless by his force, and his every trait is fixed
indelibly in the memory.

Much the same is to be said of Olivia. For the coquette Celimene
is substituted a woman whose “impudence is like a professed cour¬
tesan’s.” 1 Shameless, disgusting, she is, but individual and unfor¬
gettable. With these two goes the litigious widow. Voltaire thought
her the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage.
Macaulay calls her “beyond comparison Wycherley s best comic char¬
acter,” while in the same breath he dubs her merely “the Countess
in Racine’s Plaideurs, talking the jargon of English instead of that
of French chicane.” But it is not the Widow’s jargon that makes
her the effective character that she is : it is the immortal energy with
which she pursues her ends, her self-reliance, the almost masculine
competence with which she handles her suitors, the dominating will,
unbroken till the end. And these are Wycherley’s.

Freeman is a worse Philinte, and wherein he is worse becomes,
like Manly and Olivia, original. Philinte’s grounds for his attitude
toward the world are rational; Freeman’s purely and individually
selfish. Where Philinte after the departure of those whom he has
received with warmth of manner speaks of them with indifference,
Freeman calls them “rogues, villains, rascals” whom he despises and
hates. Wholly Wycherley’s also is Freeman’s clever pursuit of the
Widow, and his final victory over her at her own game. Novel and
Plausible, if suggested by the Acaste and Clitandre of Moliere, speak
their own language, and Plausible is individualized and differentiated
from his companion more than is Clitandre. Fidelia, inevitably a
failure from the modern point of view, is at least differentiated from
her predecessor by her inferiority and by the unpleasant part which
she is made to play in Manly’s intrigue.

In plot and action Wycherley’s play is quite as much distinguished
from Moliere’s as in characterization. The similarities have already
been shown: the differences are far greater. As in The Country
Wife the action is immensely increased over that of the French play.
The most effective characterization and the wittiest dialogue could
not supply the place of the vivacious movement demanded by the
Restoration audience. Wycherley’s talent was naturally bent to the
satisfaction of this demand; and what this means in regard to the
‘Taine, History of Eng. Lit., I, 485.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 79

originality of this play is seen in the fact that the whole Widow
Blackacre-Freeman-Oldfox-Jerry intrigue, and the Manly-Vernish-
Olivia-Fidelia intrigue, save in the general foundations already
pointed out, are Wycherley’s own. Of all the effective scenes bor¬
rowed from Moliere, only one, the letter scene, is an integral part
of the action. At the beginning of the play both intrigues are set
going, the fate of Manly and that of the Widow are revealed as the
goals of the action, and no character-drawing or brilliant dialogue is
allowed very long to delay the movement. The action not only moves
but develops, the intrigue is constantly supplied with sudden turns
and surprises, is increasingly complicated but never confusing, and
it is brought to an end by dramatic revelations which form a genuine
climax of interest. Of all this there is nothing in Moliere.

In the dialogue more is due to the French author than in The
Country Wife; but even in the borrowings it is general conceptions
rather than language that is borrowed. A Manly cannot speak like
an Alceste, or an Olivia like a Celimene. The wit and the satire are
non-French both in their downright force and directness, and in their
coarseness. As in the characterization and the intrigue the whole
atmosphere is peculiarly English and peculiarly Wycherley’s.

Having thus reviewed in detail the relations of Wycherley’s two
plays to those of Moliere, one may now look at those relations in a
broader light.

Typical Restoration comedy is what has aptly been called the
comedy of “recognition.” It gave the audience the pleasure of
recognizing on the stage what it saw daily in actual life, and amused
it in the theater with the same amusements that it had in actual life.
The ideals and standards, the objects of admiration and of ridicule,
of the typical play were those of the circle for whom the play was
written. If the successful pursuit of “love”-intrigues, if reputation
as “wits,” were the chief aims of those who formed the theater’s
audience, then skilfully managed love-intrigues and witty dialogue
were bound to be the aim of the playwright. If in his love-affairs
the gallant knew no restraint of morality and in his conversation
few restraints of decency, the same freedom was to be expected on
the stage. If the unskilful, and hence unsuccessful, lover, the cuck¬
old, the would-be wit, the empty-headed fop, the unconscious fool,
the unfashionable “cit,” the country bumpkin, were the objects of
actual mirth and derision, these were the natural sources of comic

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

effect upon the stage. In the typical Restoration play the norm was
the taste of the court circle, and it was departure from that norm
that made the comic incongruity. Sympathy with his characters, a
serious interest in their conduct or fate, or a desire to suggest a more
reasonable or a more elevated standard of judgment were absent in
the typical Restoration playwright.

But an examination of the work of the great French writer
who in material and manner so largely influenced the English drama
of his day reveals a comedy with a very different attitude and pur¬
pose. His is also a comedy of recognition, finding its material in
the inexhaustible phases of daily life and filled with inextinguishable
laughter at the follies and weaknesses of his contemporaries. But
Moliere had standards other and higher than those of the society of
his time. For him the norm was not the prevalent taste, but “the
reasonable demands of society.” 1 What was reasonable he esti¬
mated by the standards of his own social philosophy. He demanded
that the individual should be true to his real self, unaffected by the
conceits and fashions and affectations of his fellows; but he de¬
manded also that the individual should recognize that he lived in
a world of his fellows, and that with their claims to the realization
of their best selves his own claim must not come into opposition.
He selected characters whose conduct was at variance with this law,
and he showed how such conduct meets with inevitable disaster. He
taught his lessons with sane and purifying iaughter, with tenderness
and sympathy ; but he was, at the same time, instructor and cor¬
rector — castigat ridendo mores.

It is plain that the inward spirit of this man’s work is wholly
different from that of the typical English Restoration comedy.
Wycherley alone in his time did not derive from Moliere merely
the notion of a comedy of daily life, or treat him merely as a mine
°f material or a teacher of manner; but drew from his study some
faint infusion of the master’s spirit. This is to be seen chiefly in
two things . in Wycherley s satiric attitude and in his presentation of
certain characters whose principles and conduct he appears to offer
as worthy of approval.

The satiric spirit Wycherley shared, of course, with his fellow
playwrights. The objects of his derision were largely the same as
theirs, and the standards by which he found them laughable. But
‘Cf. Miles, The Influence of Moliere on Restoration Comedy, p. 68.

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 81

he had other standards than these, standards not merely intellectual
and the taste of his time, but genuine convictions of right social life,
of a social life in which morality was not wholly disregarded. If
Wycherley is “the most licentious writer of a licentious age,” he is
such in the nature of the material that he uses and the frank audacity
with which he handles it ; not — and this one would wish to empha¬
size, even if some exception has to be made — in an attitude of de¬
light in it or even of sympathy with it.

In The Country Wife Horner and Lady Fidget stand for the
shamelessness of men and women. In them Wycherley has pushed
aside any seductiveness that the intriguing gallants and ladies or the
comic playwrights may have found in the immoral conduct of their
class, any veil of illusion with which they invested it; what these
figures reveal is licentiousness in its essential nature, naked, bestial,
devoid of any trace of finer emotion. Such figures were in them¬
selves the keenest satire upon the men and women who looked upon
them in the theater. Stripped of all glamour and grace, here was a
reality, a portrait to the life, beyond any realism to which they had
been accustomed. It is true that Wycherley leaves Horner victorious
at the end of the comedy, and Lady Fidget free to pursue her
adulterous way. Moliere’s method of enforcing a social thesis is
adopted only to the extent of making Pinchwife pay the penalty of
his jealousy, just as in The Gentleman Dancing-Master Wycherly
enforces the similar thesis that unnatural restraint of a daughter is
the surest way to lose her. But if poetic justice is not done upon
Horner and Fidget, this by no means leaves us to suppose that
Wycherley was in love with the nastiness he drew. It is evident
enough that he had no intent to play the part of a reformer; but
it is equally evident that he cherished no illusions as to the real
nature of the life about him. It would seem that no one could
read the scene (V. 4) in which Horner and Lady Fidget frankly
reveal themselves to each other as they are, and believe that Wycher¬
ley meant them for other than essentially typical, if extreme, ex¬
amples of the man and woman of pleasure, or that he felt for them
other than scorn. Satire upon the true nature of “gallantry” could
hardly go further and remain within the bounds of legitimate comedy.

In The Plain Dealer Wycherley’s satire takes on a deeper note.
It has become intenser, bitter, vehement. In the Prologue he utters
his purpose boldly, directly : —

8 2 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

But the coarse dauber of the corning scenes
To follow life and nature only means ;

Displays you as you are; makes his fine woman
A mercenary jilt, and true to no man:

His men of wit and pleasure of the age
Are as dull rogues as ever cumber’d stage :

He draws a friend only to custom just,

And makes him naturally betray his trust.

I, only, act a part like none of you,

And yet you'll say, it is a fool’s part too :

An honest man ; who, like you, never winks
At faults ; but, unlike you, speaks what he thinks :

The onely fool who ne’r found patron yet,

For truth is now a fault, as well as wit.

And where else, but on stages, do we see
Truth pleasing, or rewarded honesty?

Which our bold poet does this day in me.

Olivia and Vernish are Wycherley’s examples of the false mistress
and the false friend, but they are more than examples. They are
presented as typical of the fine woman and the customary friend,
and as in The Country Wife they are made extreme types, that
Wycherley’s judgment of his world may be the clearer and more
forceful. It is the speeches of Manly that in general convey the
author’s criticism, and nothing could be more cynical or bitter.
They are the words of a man who finds the world utterly false and
worthless. So thorough-going is the satire, so intense the feeling,
that the comic ridicule virtually disappears ; and in spite of Novel
and Plausible, in spite of the Widow, the play as a whole is in¬
vested with an almost savage seriousness that goes far toward re¬
moving it from the bounds of genuine comedy. How far it is from
the typical Restoration play is felt at once when it is compared with
any of the plays of Etheredge or Vanbrugh.

Whence came these standards of judgments peculiar to Wycher¬
ley? No complete answer to that question is possible without a
history of Wycherley’s mind of which we possess no trace; but it
is more than probable that they were partly derived from the master
whose work he had so carefully studied and adapted to his own
ends. The social philosophy, the judgments and purposes of Moliere
were too plain for him to overlook. That he made them at least
partly his own is all the clearer because he could not preserve the
gaiety or sympathy with which the Frenchman treated the faults

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 83

he would correct. Wycherley’s vehemence and cynicism are only to
be explained as the natural language of an Englishman to whom
ridicule and mirth were inadequate for the treatment of that for
which he felt downright scorn.

That Wycherley’s satiric attitude toward society derived some¬
thing of its impulse from Moliere is the more certain because of
Moliere’s influence upon those characters of Wycherley that may
in some sense be called ideal, characters whose conduct Wycherley
regards with approbation and puts forward as examples of a right
social attitude and life — Alithea in The Country Wife , Eliza, Fidelia
and Manly in The Plain Dealer. Three of these characters are
adapted, as we have seen, from Moliere. Alithea and Eliza — Moli-
eres Leonor and fdiante — are presented as types of women who are
able healthily to enjoy the world without loss of sincerity or virtue,
true social women. Faithfulness in love Wycherley had already
depicted in the Christina of his first play; but Fidelia he makes a
romantic type, unique in Restoration comedy, of an absolutely loving
and devoted woman, in sharpest contrast to Wycherley’s typical
woman of the world. Imperfect as all these characters are, they are
immensely significant in comparison with the characters of the other
comic playwrights of Wycherley’s day. He alone made special effort
to present to his audience the positively admirable woman.

Most significant of all is the character of Manly, and in no re¬
spect more significant of Moliere’s influence than in his unlikeness
to Moliere’s misanthrope from whom he was adapted. Alceste is
presented as a faulty character, whose weakness is satirized and
shown to produce inevitable disaster. For his sincerity, his demand
for plain dealing, there is entire sympathy; for his hostility to
humanity, his unsocialness, condemnation. This figure Wycherley
takes as his hero, and presents him with approbation. His demand
for sincerity, his hostility to the world as hypocritical, false, un¬
worthy, are supported and enforced throughout. If he have a
weakness, it is the weakness of inconstancy to his own beliefs. It
is because he does not distrust the world sufficiently that he is be¬
trayed by Olivia and Vernish. Alceste is left at the end of the
play a disappointed and lonely man ; Manly is rewarded by the dis¬
covery of the one true woman in the world, and by a friend
who is at last acceptable because he is become — by authorial com¬
pulsion, to be sure — “a Plain-dealer too.” And lest someone cry

84 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

out that the reward is inconsistent with Manly s wholesale condem¬
nation of mankind, the author has taken his precaution. This is
an ideal, not a realistic outcome :

Where else, but on stages, do we see

Truth pleasing, or rewarded honesty?

From Moliere’s character Wycherley took that side which made
most appeal to him: he showed his contemporaries a misanthrope
upon whom they had most need to look. There was no need to
satirize to them the vice of hostility to society; there was abundant
need to satirize society’s selfish hypocrisy. It was a plain dealer in
a world of deceit that Wycherley made his hero, not an enemy of
society in a world which reasonably demanded that the individual
should harmonize his life with itself. In Manly, most of all, does
Wycherley show both his ability to draw something of the best
from Moliere’s philosophy, and at the same time, by his adaptation
of it to the needs of his own stage and world, his originality. His
was a genuine process of assimilation; and because it was such
it is true both that Wycherley derives from others the hint of much
that is of value in his plays, and that “the best things are his own.”

Profligacy was not the only thing original about Wycherley;
and if his Manly is a “ferocious sensualist,” that fact must not be
allowed to conceal what he is else. Manly’s sensualism is exercised
upon but one woman. He is not a Horner, securing a free range
for his animal passions among women by a disgusting ruse, he is
not even the ordinary rake of Restoration drama or society. He is
created to be a contrast to that type, is the man of but one love.
He proclaims that “a true heart admits but of one friendship, as of
one love”; and if he loves Olivia for her beauty, there can be no ques¬
tion that he is also both sincere and truthful when he declares that
he loves Olivia because (as he believes her ,to be) “she is all truth
and hates the lying world.” When he is undeceived, it is both a mad
love and a mad anger that concentrate in the “ferocious” and
“nauseous” deed by which in the nihilism of the moment he seeks to
satisfy both. It is most unfortunate for the effect of Wycherley’s
idealism that he pictures the brutal will and deed with such tre¬
mendous power. To any sane mind it deals a deadly blow to a
conception of Manly as an essentially manly character, just as
Fidelia’s subservience, in spite of her protests, destroys any possi-

THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY 85

bility of regarding her as a truly admirable and lovable woman.
But when all is said, it yet remains true that Wycherley does not
acquiesce in the view of moral values held by society and by his
fellow dramatists, that he repudiates much to which they assent, and
tries not without success, however partial and however inconsistent,
to hold up an admirable contrast.

Struggling vaguely and blindly in the fog of the social life of
his day, Wycherley had yet some vision of a saner and higher social
life ; confused and baffled by the ethical nihilism of his circle, he had
yet some perception of the foulness of sensualism, of the degradation
of insincerity and selfishness, and some vision of true manliness and
the real values of life. To these visions he gave expression as im¬
perfect, confused and inconsistent as the visions themselves. It is in
this expression that his originality chiefly consists ; and if there can¬
not be claimed for it any considerable degree of that spontaneous,
genuinely creative and interpretive power which alone deserves the
name originality in the truest sense, it is yet distinct from the work
of his fellow dramatists and from that of his dramatic master,
Moliere, and it has a literary, dramatic and moral worth of its own.

, ■

THE RELATION OF BACON’S ESSAYS TO HIS PROGRAM
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

Ronald S. Crane.

Associate Professor of English, Northwestern University.

THE prevailing opinion concerning the relation of Bacon’s
Essays to the great philosophical enterprise of his middle and
later life would still seem to be that formulated, nearly a
generation ago, by the late Edward Arber. The Essays, he wrote,1
“formed no essential part’’ of Bacon’s work; “they entered not into
his conceptions of the proficiency and advancement of knowledge.
Like his History of Henry VII .. . and his intended History of
Henry VIII . . . these Counsels are by-works of his life, the
labours, as it were, of his left hand ; his right being occupied in
grasping the Instauration.”

In spite of the fact that this view is in apparent harmony with
Bacon’s own opinion, expressed in 1622 to Bishop Andrews,2 it
is, I believe, a demonstrably mistaken one. In particular, it fails
to take account of the large number of close resemblances, both of
substance and of form, between the Essays — especially those first
printed in 1612 and 1625 — and certain portions of the Advance¬
ment of Learning (1605) and of the De Augmentis Scientiarum
(1623). Though some of these resemblances have been noted by
earlier students of Bacon,3 their general significance for the inter¬
pretation of the Essays has never, to my knowledge, been ade-

x A Harmony of the Essays, etc., of Francis Bacon (Westminster, 1895),
p. xxvii.

3 “As for my Essays, and some other particulars of that nature, I count
them but as the recreations of my other studies, and in that sort purpose to
continue them ; though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would,
with less pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more lustre and reputation
to my name, than those other which I have in hand.” See James Spedding,
The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1868-90), VII, 374.

8 Notably by F. G. Selby in the notes to his editions of the Essays
(London, 1895) and of the Advancement (London, 1898), and by Pierre
Villey in his Montaigne et Francois Bacon (Paris, 1913), pp. 39-40. By far
the most complete list of parallels between the Essays and Bacon’s other
works — a list to which I am much indebted in this paper — is to be found in an
unpublished Master’s thesis by one of my former students, Mrs. Frank Haw¬
ley, of La Grange, Illinois.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

quately appreciated. It is the intention of this paper to consider
their bearing, first on Bacon’s purpose and choice of themes in the
Essays, and second on the changes in method and style which dis¬
tinguished the Essays of 1612 and 1625 from those of 1597-

“I will now attempt,” Bacon wrote at the beginning of the Second
Book of the Advancement of Learning,1 “to make a general and
faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts
thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by
the industry of man ; to the end that such a plot made and recorded
to memory may both minister light to any public designation, and
also serve to excite voluntary endeavours. . . . For the present
study, two stages of this “perambulation are of particular im¬
portance — those dealing respectively with “moral” and with “civil”
knowledge.2

“Moral knowledge” Bacon divided into two parts : “the Exemplar
or Platform of Good, and the Regiment or Culture of the Mind;
the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how
to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto.” 3
In treating the first of these topics he contented himself largely
with a somewhat scholastic analysis of the aspects of good — indi¬
vidual good and good of communion, good active and good passive.
When he reached the second, however, his attitude became once
more that of the pioneer, intent on setting forth “what ground lieth
unmanured.” “This part therefore,” he wrote,4 “because of the
excellency thereof, I cannot but find exceeding strange that it is not
reduced to written inquiry. ... It is reasonable therefore that we
propound it in the more particularity, both for the worthiness, and
because we may acquit ourselves for reporting it deficient. . . .
We will therefore enumerate some heads or points thereof, that it
may appear the better what it is, and whether it be extant.” And

1 The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (New
edition, London, 1887-1901), III, 328. Unless otherwise specified, all refer¬
ences to Bacon in this article are to this edition.

* HI, 417-45 and 445-76- For the corresponding portions of the De Aug¬
ments, see I, 713-828. Hereafter I shall give page references to the De
Augments only when its text differs in substance from that of the Advance¬
ment.

•HI, 419-

BACON’S ESSAYS

he proceeded to outline at length three principal desiderata : “de¬
scriptions of the several characters and tempers of men’s natures
and dispositions, specially having regard to those differences which
are most radical in being the fountains and causes of the rest” ; 1
similar descriptions of the passions or “affections” ; 2 and studies
of the most appropriate means of reducing the mind “unto virtue
and good estate.” 3

Under “civil knowledge” Bacon included three topics : “wisdom
of the behaviour,” or conversation ; “wisdom of business,” or nego¬
tiation ; and “wisdom of state,” or government.4 The first of these,
as it had already been “elegantly handled,” 5 he dismissed in a few
words, devoting the greater part of an unusually long section to
pointing out, with much illustrative detail, the “omissions and de¬
ficiencies” of the other two. The subject of negotiation or business,
in its two aspects of rules for the handling of particular situations
and of precepts for advancement in life, seemed to him especially
in need of cultivation ; “it is,” he remarked,6 “by learned men for
the most part despised, as an inferior to virtue and an enemy to
meditation ; for wisdom of Government, they acquit themselves well
when they are called to it, but that happeneth to few; but for the
wisdom of Business, wherein man’s life is most conversant, there
be no books of it, except some few scattered advertisements, that
have no proportion to the magnitude of this subject.” As for the
“wisdom of government,” his first sketch of the subject, in the
Advancement / was brief and somewhat perfunctory. He made up
for this, however, in the De Augmentis 8 by treating at length two
main desiderata — the doctrine “de proferendis finibus imperii” and
the doctrine “de justftia universali.”

Such, in brief, was the program outlined by Bacon in 1605 and
retouched and made more explicit in several particulars in 1623. It
was, I believe, in the light of this program and as a partial ful¬
filment of it that he composed a large number of the essays first
published in the editions of 1612 and 1625.

‘Ill, 434-37-

2 III, 437-41-

* III, 44I-43-

4 HI, 445-

* III, 447-

•HI, 447-

7 III, 473-76.

*1, 792-828.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The proof of this assertion lies in the number and closeness of
the correspondences between the themes and substance of these es¬
says and the discussions of desiderata in the sections of the Ad¬
vancement and the De Augmentis which have just been analyzed.
Consider, in the first place, the following passage of the Advance¬
ment, in which Bacon is urging the value of “sound and true dis¬
tributions and descriptions of the several characters and tempers of
men’s natures and dispositions” :

Of much like kind are those impressions of nature, which are imposed upon
the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness,
by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not extern;
and again those which are caused by extern fortune; as sovereignty, nobility,
obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, con¬
stant fortune, variable fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus, and the like.
. . . These observations and the like I deny not but are touched a little by
Aristotle as in passage in his Rhetorics, and are handled in some scattered
discourses; but they were never incorporate into Moral Philosophy, to which
they do essentially appertain. ... 1

Is it fanciful to suppose that in writing the essays “Of Youth and
Age,” “Of Beauty,” “Of Deformity,” “Of Nobility,” “Of Great
Place,” “Of Riches,” “Of Adversity,” and “Of Fortune” — all ex¬
cept “Of Adversity” (1625) first published in the edition of 1612 —
Bacon was attempting to supply a want which he himself had pointed
out only a few years before? The very number of the parallels lends
support to the supposition. Again, it seems to me altogether prob¬
able that in composing such essays as “Of Love” (1612), “Of
Envy” (1625), and “Of Anger” (1625) he had consciously in mind
the lack, noted in the next paragraph of the Advancement, of “ac¬
tive and ample descriptions and observations” concerning the “dis¬
eases and infirmities of the mind, which are no other than the per¬
turbations and distempers of the affections.” 2 The “best doctors of
this knowledge,” he remarked, are the poets and historians. In
them

we may find painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and
incited, and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act
and further degree; how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they
vary, how they gather and fortify. . . ,3

III, 436-37.
HI,

III,

437-

438.

BACON’S ESSAYS

Now, not only did Bacon in these particular essays make abundant
use of material drawn from poets and historians, but in one of
them — ‘Of Anger” — he dealt explicitly with several of the points
on which he thought their testimony of most value :

We will first speak [he wrote in the first paragraph of this essay] how the
natural inclination and habit to be angry may be attempered and calmed.
Secondly, how the particular motions of anger may be repressed, or at least
refrained from doing mischief. Thirdly, how to raise anger or appease anger
in another.1

Much the same thing, once more, may be said of the essays “Of
Custom and Education” (1612), “Of Praise” (1612), “Of Nature
in Men” (1612), “Of Studies” (1597; enlarged in 1612 and 1625),
“Of Friendship” (1612; rewritten in 1625), and “Of Fame” (pub¬
lished by Rawley in 1657) : 2 they all treat subjects which Bacon
in 1605 had noted as “deficient” :

Now come we to those points which are within our own command, and
have force and operation upon the mind to affect the will and appetite and to
alter manners : wherein they ought to have handled custom, exercise, habit,
education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, praise, reproof,
exhortation, fame, laws, books, studies. . . .3

In the case of one of these essays, the dependence upon the Ad¬
vancement is particularly close. After the passage just quoted,
Bacon introduced, as “an example of the rest,” a page of aphorisms
or “precepts” on the subject of “Custom and Habit.” Now two
of these “precepts” are to be found in the essay “Of Nature in
Men” (1612), 4 and what is more, nearly the whole of this essay
may be reconstructed out of material given here and in an earlier
page of the Advancement .6

So much for the essays which seem directly related to Bacon’s
program for the advancement of “moral knowledge.” The list of
those which can be connected in a similar way with his proposals
for the development of “civil knowledge” is nearly as long. To be¬
gin with, while it is not likely that Bacon meant to refer to writings
of his own when he remarked, apropos of the “wisdom of conver¬
sation,” that “this part of civil knowledge hath been aegantly

‘VI, 510.

aVI, 519.

•in, 438.

4Cf. VI, 571-72 (text of 1612).

•HI, 415.

92 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

handled, and therefore I cannot report it for deficient,” 1 it is per¬
haps worth noting that two of the essays published in i597~
Discourse” and “Of Ceremonies and Respects”— treated themes
belonging unmistakably to this branch of the subject. Moreover,
at least three other essays of the same date— “Of Negotiating,” “Of
Followers and Friends,” and “Of Faction”— dealt with subjects
mentioned specifically by Bacon in the same general section of the
Advancement.2 As these essays, however, were already in existence
several years before the program with which we are concerned was
set forth, they can hardly be said, with any certainty, to have been
inspired by it.

The case is obviously different with essays first published in 1612
or 1625, and it is noteworthy that several of these developed topics
indicated as “deficient” in the Advancement or the De Augmentis.
Thus the essay “Of Counsel” (1612) reads like a deliberate con¬
tribution to what Bacon called 8 the “wisdom of counsel and ad¬
vice in private causes” : * it is illustrated, as he says treatises on
this subject should be, by fable and history,® and it contains in the
first paragraph a commentary on a proverb of Solomon not unlike
those which he had introduced into the same section of the Ad¬
vancement “to give authority to this part of knowledge.” 6 Sim¬
ilarly, the essays “Of Vain-glory” (1612), “Of Dispatch” (1612),
“Of Boldness” (1625), “Of Delays” (1625), and “Of Simulation
and Dissimulation” (1625) would appear to have had their origin
in a passage of the Advancement in which Bacon set forth the
“heads” of a series of possible treatises on the “doctrine of ad¬
vancement in life.” 7 And finally, it seems to me fairly clear that
the essays “Of Seditions and Troubles” (written, 1607-12; 8 first
published in an expanded form, 1625), “Of the True Greatness of

1 HI, 447.

3 Cf . Ill, 447, 456, 462, 474-

•III, 448.

4 The essays “Of Cunning^’ (1612) and “Of Wisdom for a Man's Self”
(1612) exhibit a similar inspiration.

4 Cf. Ill, 453-

•111,448-52.

• III, 456-71- The following passages contain the germs, and in several
cases, some of the illustrative material, of the essays mentioned in the text:
462-63 (“Of Vain-glory”) ; 463-64 (“Of Boldness”) ; 465-66 (“Of Delays”) ;
466-68 (“Of Simulation and Dissimulation”) ; 469 (“Of Dispatch”)

• Cf. VI, 535-36, 589.

BACON’S ESSAYS

Kingdoms and Estates” (16x2; eniarged in 1625), “Of Empire”
(1612; enlarged in 1625), and “Of Plantations” (1625) were either
written or enlarged by Bacon in deliberate fulfilment of his pro¬
gram, sketched in 1605 and greatly elaborated in 1623, for the de¬
velopment of that branch of “civil knowledge” that had to do par¬
ticularly with the art of government. To become convinced that this
is true in the case of “Of Seditions and Troubles,” one has only
to read Bacon’s statement in the Advancement 1 that “unto princes
and states . . . , the natures and dispositions of the people, their
conditions and necessities, their factions and combinations, their
animosities and discontents, ought to be ... in great part clear
and transparent,” and then turn to the opening sentence of the essay
in which the motive for its composition is indicated : “Sheapards of
people had neede knowe the Kalenders of Tempests in State.” 2 In
the case of “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” the
evidence is even more striking. This essay as it appeared in the
volume of 1625 was identical, language excepted, with a long dis¬
course which Bacon had introduced into the De Augmentis two years
before as an “example of a summary treatise touching the extension
of empire,” 3 and which in turn represented the enlargement of a
short essay published in 1612. 4 The revision, in short, if not the
original composition of the essay, was the result of preoccupa¬
tions intimately connected with the development of Bacon’s scheme
for the advancement of “civil knowledge.” 5 That a similar rela¬
tionship existed between this scheme and the essays “Of Empire”
and “Of Plantations” cannot perhaps be so clearly demonstrated.
Both essays, however, have much in common with “Of the True
Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” and both treat subjects listed
in the same chapter of the De Augmentis which contains the Latin
version of that essay.6

Such, then, are the chief parallels in theme between Bacon’s
later essays and his previously formulated program for the im-

1 III, 474-

1 VI, 589 (text of 1607-12). „

3 1, 792-802.

4 VI, 586-88.

3 See below, p. 12.

* Cf. I, 792: “Cum Artes Imperii tria Officia Politica complectantur ; primo,
ut Imperium conservetur ; secundo, ut beatum efhciatur et Horens; tertio, ut
amplificetur finesque ejus longius proferantur. ...”

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

provement of “moral” and “civil” knowledge.1 In view of the
fact that these correspondences involve more than half of the pieces
written in 1612 and 1625, and extend in a number of cases to de¬
tails of their substance, it is hard to escape the conclusion that one
of the principal influences on the composition of the later essays
was precisely those “conceptions of the proficiency and advancement
of knowledge” of which it has been customary to suppose the Es¬
says independent. I say “one of the principal influences”; for I
believe that Bacon’s choice of subjects in the later Essays can be
fully explained only by taking into account a number of other
causes. Chief among these, no doubt, was the orientation given
to his reflections by his youthful practice of collecting common¬
places. One of the results of this practice— a series of “Antitheta
Rerum,” or groups of contrasting maxims on general topics, com¬
piled by him when he was a young man — is preserved for us in
the De Augmentis ; 2 in it may be found the subjects and a consid¬
erable number of the detailed ideas or images of at least nineteen
of the essays published in 1612 and 1625. 3 Again, several of the
Essays clearly had their ultimate origins in episodes of Bacon’s
career as a publicist and statesman. Thus “Of Unity in Religion”
(1612; revised and enlarged, 1625) obviously grew out of the pre¬
occupations that had inspired his pamphlet entitled An Advertise¬
ment touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1589) ; 4
“Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates” (1612, 1625)
had its inception in a speech on the Union with Scotland delivered

1 At least one of the later essays, it may be noted in passing, owes its gen¬
eral inspiration and some of its illustrative details, to another section of
Bacon’s program— that dealing with “divine knowledge.” Compare the 1625
text of Of Unity in Religion’ (VI, 381-84) with a passage in the De
Augmentis (I, 833-34), in which he sets down among the deficients a treatise
on the “degrees of unity in the kingdom of God.” The same idea is ex¬
pressed in a less definite form in the Advancement (III, 482).

I> 689-706- 1 he period of compilation is fixed by the following passage
(I, 706) : Atque haec Antitheta . . . fortasse tanti non fuerint; sed cum jam
ohm parata et collecta a nobis essent, noluimus diligentiae nostrae juvenilis
fructum perire. ... In illo autem adolescentiam plane spirant, quod sint in
Moral}, sive Demonstrative genere uberiora ; in Deliberative et Judiciali per-

pauca.

Cf. Villey, Montaigne et Francois Bacon, pp. 30-31.

Letters and Life, I. 74IT.

BACON’S ESSAYS

by Bacon in the House of Commons in February 1607, and devel¬
oped the following year in a tract called Of the True Greatness of
the Kingdom of Britain ;l and “Of Usury” (1625) embodied, with-
but few changes, the greater part of a memorial on the same sub¬
ject drawn up in April 1623 for presentation to the King.2 The Es¬
says, in short, exhibit traces of various other influences besides those
which form the special subject of this paper. To admit this, how¬
ever, is not to lessen one’s conviction that one of Bacon’s primary
motives in composing a majority of the pieces contained in his
second and third collections was a desire to supply some of the de¬
ficiencies in morality and policy of which he had become aware while
engaged in the “general and faithful perambulation of learning”
which constituted the first stage in his great philosophical under¬
taking. Certainly all of the evidence which has been assembled
points to some such interpretation of his purpose as this ; 3 and
it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to assume that it was his con¬
sciousness of this purpose that dictated his choice of subtitle for
the volume of 1625. For assuredly if the preceding remarks have
not been entirely beside the point, no phrase could have been more
appropriate, under the circumstances, than Counsels Civil ayid
Moral.*

Whoever has taken the pains to read the Essays in the order
and form of their original publication must inevitably have been
struck, on passing from the essays of 1597 to those of 1612 and
then to those of 1625, by several outstanding differences in method

1 VII, 39-40, 47764.

2 Letters and Life, VII, 410, 414-19.

* Villey ( Montaigne et Francois Bacon, p. 40) reaches a similar conclu¬
sion, but confines its application merely to a few of the essays published in
1625. He contributes a valuable point, however, by calling attention to the
analogy, from the point of view of their relation to his program for the
advancement of knowledge, between these essays and Bacon’s Historia V en-
torum, Historia Vitce et Mortis, and Historia Densi et Rari, which form
“modeles des etudes d’histoire naturelle qu’il demande” in the Advancement
and the De Augmentis (cf. Ill, 37off. ; I, 501-02), and his collection of
Apophthegms (VII, I2iff.), which are “modeles de ces recueils qu’il desire
voire extraire des histoires” (cf. Ill, 342). To these parallels we may add
the History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1625) and the fragment of
a History of the Reign of King Henry VIII (published by Rawley in 1629),
both of which would seem to have been written in fulfilment of a suggestion
made in the Advancement (III, 336-37).

‘Cf. VI, 535-

96 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

and style.1 In the first place, as compared with the essays of 1597,
those of 1612 and 1625 exhibit a marked tendency toward greater
fullness and coherence in the development of particular ideas, so
that instead of being mere collections of juxtaposed maxims with¬
out connective elements, they are now for the most part closely
articulated compositions. How great a difference this is may be
seen from the following passages representing Bacon’s manner in
the three successive stages of his work :

OF DISCOURSE (1597)

tf If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to
knowe, you shall bee thought another time to know that you know not.
If Speech of a mans selfe is not good often, and there is but one case, wherin
a man may commend himselfe with good grace, and that is in commending
vertue in another, especially if it be such a vertue, as whereunto himselfe
pretendeth. ff Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speake
agreably to him, with whome we deale is more the to speake in good wordes
or in good order, ff A good continued speech without a good speech of
interlocution sheweth slownesse: and a good reply or second speech without a
good set speech sheweth shallownesse and weaknes, as wee see in beastes that
those that are weakest in the course are yet nimblest in the turne. ff To vse
too many circumstances ere one come to the matter is wearisome, to use none
at all is blunt.’

OF DEFORMITY (1612)

Whosoeuer hath any thing fixed in his person, that doth induce contempt ;
hath also a perpetuall spurre in himselfe, to rescue and deliuer himself from
scorne. Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold: first, as in their
owne defence, as being exposed to scorne ; but in processe of time, by a gen-
erall habite. Also, it stirreth in them industrie, and specially of this kinde, to
watch and obserue the weaknesse of others, that they may haue somewhat to
repay. Againe in their superiours, it quencheth ielousie towards them, as per¬
sons that they thinke they may at pleasure despise; and it layeth their com¬
petitors and emulators asleepe: as neuer beleeuing they should bee in possi¬
bility of aduancement, till they see them in possession. So that vpon the
whole matter, in a great wit, deformity is an aduantage to rising.’

These differences have been noted by many students of Bacon, from
Macaulay to the present day. See, for example, M. A. Scott, The Essays

F*nK?kCb\^aC°nA 1NCW- Yor£’ I?°8)> PP- Ixx-lxxi; Hugh Walker, The
Rif, \ p r ?;nf.Essa^s (London, 1915), pp. I7-20; G. P. Krapp, The

cllJfT^ngllShi Lt %ary- ,ProsJ York> I9IS) , P- 535 J and Bryan and

Crane, The English Familiar Essay (Boston, 1916), pp. xvi-xix By far the

'VI, 526.

’VI, 571.

BACON’S ESSAYS

OF BOLDNESS (1625)

It is a trivial grammar-school text, but yet worthy a wise man’s con¬
sideration. Question was asked of Demosthenes, what was the chief part
of an orator ? he answered, action: what next? action: what next again?
action. He said it that knew it best, and had by nature himself no advantage
in that he commended. A strange thing, that that part of an orator which is
but superficial, and rather the virtue of a player, should be placed so high,
above those other noble parts of invention, elocution, and the rest ; nay almost
alone, as if it were all in all. But the reason is plain. There is in human
nature generally more of the fool than of the wise. . . }

Another difference, closely related to this one, between the earlier
and later essays is the increasing frequency among the latter of es¬
says exhibiting a formal and explicit plan. Only one of the pieces
in the collection of 1597 — “Of Honor and Reputation” — and that
only in part, can be said to have any clearly marked structure at all.
The proportion is somewhat greater in the edition of 1612, 2 but
here also the prevailing type of composition, for all the increase
in coherence, is aphoristic rather than methodical. In 1625, on the
other hand, while the short planless type of essay is still to be
found, though always in a more developed form than in 1597, 3 the
number of pieces exhibiting a clear and explicit organization by
points is greatly increased.4

But after all what most clearly distinguishes the later essays of
Bacon from those in his first volume is a greater concreteness of
style, resulting from the multiplication in 1612 and still more in
1625 of various means of illustration and adornment almost entirely
lacking in 159 7 — metaphors and comparisons, historical “examples,”
“sentences” from the classics and the Bible, and here and there per¬
sonal reminiscences and observations.5 A comparison of the pas-

1VI, 401-02.

’Four essays: “Of Great Place,” “Of Counsel,” “Of Dispatch,” and “Of
Judicature.” To these may be added “Of Seditions and Troubles,” which,
though not published until 1625, was written before 1612 (see VI, 589).

3 E.g., “Of Revenge,” “Of Adversity,” “Of Delays,” “Of Innovations,”
“Of Suspicion.”

4 E.g., “Of Truth,” “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” “Of Envy,” “Of
Friendship,” “Of Usury,” “Of Building,” “Of Gardens,” “Of Anger,” “Of
Vicissitude of Things.” To the same class belong certain essays published in
1612 but more or less altered in 1625: “Of Unity in Religion,” “Of Goodness
and Goodness of Nature,” “Of Nobility,” “Of Empire,” “Of the True Great¬
ness of Kingdoms and Estates.”

5 All of these last are to be found either in essays written in 1625 or in
passages added in 1625 to essays which had appeared in earlier collections.
See “Of Cunning,” “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” “Of
Riches,” “Of Prophecies,” “Of Custom and Education,” and “Of Usury.”

98 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

sage quoted above from “Of Discourse” (i59 7) with the following
from the 1625 version of “Of Riches” will give an idea of the
character and direction of the change:

Seek not proud riches, but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly,
distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly. Yet have no abstract nor friarly
contempt of them. But distinguish, as Cicero saith well of Rabirius Post¬
humus, In studio rei amplUicandce apparebat, non avaritice prcedam, sed instru-
mentum bonitati quceri. Hearken also to Salomon, and beware of hasty
gathering of riches ; Qui festinat ad divitias, non erit insons. The poets
feign, that when Plutus (which is Riches) is sent from Jupiter, he limps and
goes slowly; but when he is sent from Pluto, he runs and is swift of foot.
Meaning that riches gotten by good means and just labour pace slowly; but
when they come by the death of others (as by the course of inheritance,
testaments, and the like), they come tumbling upon a man. But it mought
be applied likewise to Pluto, taking him for the devil. For when riches come
from the devil (as by fraud and oppression and unjust means), they come
upon speed. . . . The improvement of the ground is the most natural obtaining
of riches; for it is our great mother’s blessing, the earth’s; but it is slow.
And yet where men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry, it multiplieth
riches exceedingly. I knew a nobleman in England, that had the greatest
audits of any man in my time; a great grazier, a great sheep-master, a great
timber man, a great collier, a great corn-master, a great lead-man, and so of
iron, and a number of the like points of husbandry-. So as the earth seemed
a sea to him, in respect of the perpetual importation.1

The problem of how to account for the changes which have just
been described has naturally presented itself to more than one of
the many students of the Essays. Of the solutions which have
been offered I shall mention only two. The first — that of Macau¬
lay2 — is essentially a psychological explanation: if the style of the
later essays — for example, “Of Adversity” (1625) — is superior “in
eloquence, in sweetness and variety of expression, and in richness
of illustration” to that of the earlier — for example, “Of Studies”
(i59 7) — primary reason is that with Bacon the usual order of
mental development was reversed, so that his “fancy” came to
maturity late, long after his “judgment” had been fully formed.
The second explanation — that of M. Pierre Viiley 3 — attributes the

1 VI, 460-61. Everything after the quotation from Cicero was added in
1625 (cf. VI, 567). On the sources of the concrete elements in the Essays,
see Scott, The Essays of Francis Bacon, pp. Ixxxvii-xciv.

a “Lord Bacon” (1837), in The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay,
Edinburgh edition, VI, 240-42.

3 Montaigne et Frangois Bacon, Ch. II. This study originally appeared
in the Revue de la Renaissance during 1911 and 1912.

BACON’S ESSAYS

new elements in the later essays, particularly the increase in co¬
herence and in the number of images, “examples,” and personal rem¬
iniscences, to an external influence — the Essais of Montaigne. This
is how M. Villey sums up the matter for the essays of 1625:

Ces trois elements nouveaux, souvenirs personnels, exemples, procedes de
style et tours de phrase capables de nuancer et de preciser les idees, revelent
une transformation radicale dans la maniere de Bacon. Le systeme qui avait
preside a la construction des premiers Essais est maintenant abandonne. . . .
Bacon a passe lentement du genre des maximes au genre de la meditation.
Bien qu’il ne soit pas foumi dans les Essais de Montaigne d’exemples et
d’images, ma conviction est que Montaigne est pour beaucoup dans cette
transformation. Quiconque songera que, depuis la traduction de Florio, le
livre de Montaigne etait devenu tres populaire en Angleterre, sera tout dispose
a le croire. Par le titre qu’il avait adopte d’ailleurs, l’essayiste Anglais
n’avait-il pas marque son admiration? Ne s’etait-il pas montre enclin a subir
l’influence de son devancier ? 1

Both of these explanations I believe to be incorrect, and for much
the same reason : both err through assuming that the elements which
distinguished the later from the earlier essays constituted a manner
of writing not before practised by Bacon. The truth of the matter,
on the contrary, is that all of these elements, in varying proportions,
are to be found in works of Bacon antedating not only the essays
of 1612 but also those of 1597. Whoever will read such produc¬
tions as An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church
of England (1589), 2 the famous letter to Burleigh (cir. 1589), 3
and Certain Observations made upon a Libel (1592), 4 to say noth¬
ing of the Meditationes Sacrce and the Colors of Good and Evil,
published with the Essays of 159 yf will find abundant evidence
that the habit of writing coherent, well-planned discourses, enriched
with figures, “sentences,” and “examples,” so far from being a com¬
paratively late development, the result of a psychological change
or of the reading of Montaigne, was in reality an essential part of
Bacon’s literary equipment from the first.

How, then, are we to account for the fact that it was not until
1612, and then only in part, that this manner found its way into

2 Ibid., pp. 38-39. See also the same writer’s “Montaigne en Angleterre,”
in Revue des deux mondes, ier septembre 1913, pp. 126-27.

2 Letters and Life, I, 74-95.

* Ibid., I, 108-09.

4 Ibid., I, 146-208.

6 Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, VII, 77-92, 233-54.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

the Essays , and that even as late as 1625 Bacon continued to com¬
pose occasionally in the aphoristic style characteristic of the essays

of 1597?

An answer to these questions has been given by Villey in the
study already referred to,1 and so far as it goes, it is, I believe,
correct. Briefly, it is this: that the Essays of 1597 were conceived,
not as essays in the sense which Montaigne had already given to the
term, but as collections of maxims or “sentences,” a genre whose
popularity throughout Europe in the sixteenth century is well
known ; 2 that in composing them Bacon utilized to a great extent
collections of generalized maxims, both original and borrowed, al¬
ready recorded in his notebooks ; 3 and that, not having exhausted
these materials in his first volume and perhaps being encouraged by
the success which this volume attained, he continued the practice in a
number of the later essays, several of which are demonstrably little
more than rearrangements of “sentences” which by his own ac¬
knowledgment he had had by him since his youth.4

All this is plausible enough, and the evidence, though not as
complete as one could wish, is nevertheless sufficient. Villey, how¬
ever, has overlooked another factor, quite as important, I believe,
in explaining Bacon’s continued use of the method of aphorisms in
1612 and 1625 as the success of his first volume or as the existence
of unutilized maxims in his note books ; and that is his clearly formu¬
lated belief, expressed in 1605 and reaffirmed without change in
1623, that for certain purposes “writing in aphorisms” is to be
preferred to a more methodical and fully developed type of compo¬
sition. The passage forms part of his discussion of the “Method of
Tradition” in the Second Book of the Advancement of Learning: 8

1 Pp. 28-29, 30-31.

1 See Villey, Les sources et revolution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris,
1908), II, 8-19; W. F. Bryan, in Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXI (1916), 350-51;
and J. Zeitlin, in Journal of Eng. and Ger. Philology, XIX (1920) 47-65.

3 Two of the essays in the edition of 1597— “Of Ceremonies and Respects”
and “Of Followers and Friends”— contain material already included in Bacon’s
Protnus of Formularies and Elegancies, a commonplace book compiled between
1594 and 1596. See Durning-Lawrence, Bacon is Shake-speare (New York,
19ip). PP* 198, 200, 202, 209. These borrowings are not noted by Villey.

Cf. Villey, pp. 30-31, completed by note 3, p. 94, above, and by the follow-
iug reminiscences of the Promus in the essays of 1612 (the references in
parentheses are to the text of the Promus as printed by Durning-Lawrence,

°/' 9.f* GS°L*n<bSS, and Goodness of Nature” (238), “Of Dispatch”

U °f ?n“dsfciP (209), “Of Riches” (196), “Of Beanty” (196), and
Of Nature in Men” (196, 217). v 7’

5 III, 405. Cf . I, 665-66.

BACON’S ESSAYS

IOI

Another diversity of Method, whereof the consequence is great, is the
delivery of knowledge in Aphorisms, or in Methods ; wherein we may observe
that it hath been too much taken into custom, out of a few Axioms or obser¬
vations upon any subject to make a solemn and formal art; filling it with some
discourses, and illustrating it with examples, and digesting it into a sensible
Method ; but the writing in Aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto
the writing in Method doth not approach.

For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for
Aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith
and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off; recitals of ex¬
amples are cut off ; discourse of connexion and order is cut off ; descriptions
of practice are cut off ; so there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but
some good quantity of observation: and therefore no man can suffice, nor in
reason will attempt, to write Aphorisms, but he that is sound and grounded.
But in Methods,

Tantum series juncturaque pollet,

Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris,

as a man shall make a great shew of an art, which if it were disjointed would
come to little. Secondly, Methods are more fit to win consent or belief, but
less fit to point to action; for they carry a kind of demonstration in orb or
circle, one part illuminating another, and therefore satisfy; but particulars,
being dispersed, do best agree with dispersed directions. And lastly, Apho¬
risms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to enquire farther;
whereas Methods, carrying the shew of a total, do secure men, as if they were
at furthest.

It ought now perhaps to be clear why Bacon used “aphorisms”
rather than “methods” in writing his first essays, and why having
once chosen this medium he continued to employ it, though in a
modified form, and with decreasing frequency, until the end. So
intelligible, indeed, is his procedure in the light of what has been
said that the real problem is not to account for the persistence of
the aphoristic style, but rather to explain the gradual emergence
alongside it, in the essays of 1612 and 1625, of a style in which “dis¬
course of illustration,” “recitals of examples,” and “discourse of
connexion and order” were no longer “cut off,” but on the contrary
multiplied until they became the most striking elements in the general
effect.

The problem in the nature of things is not susceptible of an
entirely satisfactory solution; but it is possible, I believe, to in¬
dicate one of the most important factors. As I have tried to show
in the first part of this paper, many of the essays of 1612 and 1625
are intimately related in purpose and substance to the Advancement

102

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

of Learning. Now, no one, it seems to me, can turn from the most
characteristic of these essays to the Advancement without becoming
aware of the essential similarity of the style — a similarity much
more striking than that already pointed out between the same essays
and such early productions as An Advertisement touching the Con¬
troversies of the Church. The Advancement ; like the essays, abounds
in figures and in “sentences” and “examples”; like at least some of
the essays, too, it exhibits a high degree of attention to coherence
and plan. Significantly enough, the resemblance of the Advance¬
ment to the later essays appears to be closest in those passages of
the former in which Bacon undertook to furnish specimens of the
kind of inquiries he would wish to see carried out in the fields of
“moral and civil knowledge.” These passages, though indistinguish¬
able in style from the rest of the work, form in reality separate es¬
says, complete in themselves, on such themes as the roots of good
and ill,1 good active and passive,2 custom and habit,3 studies,4 the
choice of good ends,5 the wisdom of conversation,6 and the
architecture of fortune.7 How closely the style of these passages
approaches that of the essays published in 1612 and 1625, as de¬
scribed above, may be seen from the following typical extract, which
it is instructive to contrast with the 1597 version of “Of Discourse” : 8

The wisdom of Conversation ought not to be over much affected, but much
less despised , for it hath not only an honour in itself, but an influence also
into business and government. The poet saith,

Nec vultu destrue verba tuo:

a man may destroy the force of his words with his countenance : so may he
of his deeds, saith Cicero; recommending to his brother affability and easy
access ; Nil interest habere ostium apertum, vultum clausum; it is nothing won
to admit men with an open door, and to receive them with a shut and reserved
countenance. So we see Atticus, before the first interview between Caesar and
Cicero, the war depending, did seriously advise Cicero touching the composing
and ordering of his countenance and gesture. And if the government of the
countenance be of such effect, much more is that of the speech, and other
carriage appertaining to conversation; the true model whereof seemeth to me
well expressed by Livy, though not meant for this purpose; Ne aut arrogans
vtdear, aut obnoxius; quorum alterum est alienee libertatis obliti, alterum

is the difference between the passage

BACON’S ESSAYS

103

sues: the sum of behaviour is to retain a man’s own dignity, without intruding
upon the liberty of others. On the other side, if behaviour and outward
carriage be intended too much, first it may pass into affection, and then quid
deformius quam scenam in vitam transferee , to act a man’s life? But al¬
though it proceed not to that extreme, yet it consumeth time, and employeth
the mind too much. And therefore as we use to advise young students from
company keeping, by saying, Amici fures temp oris, so certainly the intending
of the discretion of behaviour is a great thief of meditation. Again, such as
are accomplished in that honor of urbanity please themselves in name, and
seldom aspire to higher virtue; whereas those that have defect in it do seek
comeliness by reputation ; for where reputation is, almost every thing be-
cometh ; but where that is not, it must be supplied by puntos and compliments.
Again, there is no greater impediment of action than an over-curious observ¬
ance of decency, and the guide of decency, which is time and season. For as
Salomon sayeth, Qui respicit ad ventos, non seminat ; et qui respicit ad nubes,
non metet ; a man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it. To conclude;
Behaviour seemeth to me as a garment of the mind, and to have the con¬
ditions of a garment. For it ought to be made in fashion ; it ought not to be
too curious ; it ought to be shaped so as to set forth any good making of the
mind, and hide any deformity ; and above all, it ought not to be too strait or
restrained for exercise or motion.1

Images, quotations and allusions, connective words and phrases :
here are all of the traits which, as we have seen, combined to give to
the pieces in the two later collections their distinctive physiognomy.
And what is true of this passage is true of all the others which I
have listed. The mystery, in short, of Bacon’s changed manner in
his later essays is now revealed ; in writing these essays he merely
adopted, more and more completely, the style which he had used
in the Adt'ancement of Learning ,2

The motives which prompted him to do this are not hard to
conjecture. For one thing, many of the later essays, as we have
seen, bore the same relation to the program formulated in the Ad¬
vancement and the Dc Augmentis as the passages just studied ; and
two of them in particular were made up, in whole or in part, of
material already utilized as examples of possible treatises in one or

1 III, 445-47- .

a His borrowing extended even to particular allusions, figures, and turns of
expression. The greatest number of these reminiscences are to be found in
the essays of 1612; the list includes the opening metaphor in “Of Wisdom for
a Man's Self’’ (cf. Ill, 454), a fable from .Hsop and a Biblical “sentence’’ in
“Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature’’ (cf. Ill, 319. 443), a quotation from
Solomon in “Of Empire’’ (cf. Ill, 280), a simile in “Of Praise’’ (cf. Ill, 291-
92), three similes in “Of Nature in Men” (III, 415, 439), a “sentence” and an
“example” in “Of Fortune” (cf. Ill, 454), a “sentence” in “Of Death” (cf.
Ill, 427), and a “sentence” in “Of Love” (cf. Ill, 328).

104 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

the other of these works.1 What more natural, then, than that in
composing the essays thus inspired Bacon should have selected as
the medium most appropriate to their subject-matter the style, not
of his Essays of 1597, but of the specimen treatises which he had
introduced into the Advancement f

Again, it is not impossible that his adoption in the essays of at
least one feature of the style used in the Advancement was the
result of conscious conviction. In several passages in the section of
the latter work devoted to “moral and civil knowledge,” Bacon laid
particular stress upon the value of history and poetry as sources
of precepts and illustrations. Thus, apropos, of the neglect of the
“part of knowledge touching the several characters of natures and
dispositions,” he wrote that “. . . this kind of observations wan-
dereth in words, but is not fixed in inquiry . . . ; wherein our
fault is the greater, because both history, poesy, and daily experi¬
ence are as goodly fields where these observations grow ; whereof
we make a few posies to hold in our hands, but no man bringeth
them to the confectionary, that receipts might be made of them for
use of life.” 2 Similarly, for “the inquiry touching the affections,”
he thought that the “best doctors” were “the poets and writers of
histories” : in them “we may find painted forth with great life, how
affections are kindled and incited ; and how pacified and refrained ;
and how again contained from act and further degree ; how they
disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather
and fortify, how they are inwrapped one within another, and how
they do fight and encounter one with another, and other like par¬
ticularities : amongst the which this last is of special use in moral
and civil matters. ...” 3 And again, in the course of his treat¬
ment of “civil knowledge” he remarked that “the form of writing
which of all others is fittest for this variable argument of negotia¬
tion and occasions is that which Machiavel chose wisely and aptly
for government; namely, discourse upon histories or examples. For
knowledge drawn freshly and in our view out of particulars, knoweth
the way best to particulars again.” 4 After these declarations, it is
not difficult to understand the prominence which he gave to “ex-

1 See above, pp. 91, 93.

Nil, 435. The point is made even more emphatic in the De Auqmentis
Cf. I, 733-34-

s III, 438. Cf. above, pp. 90-91.

4 HI, 453-

BACON’S ESSAYS

105

amples” from historians and poets in such later essays as “Of Sedi¬
tions and Troubles,” “Of Empire,” “Of Counsel,” “Of Friendship,”
“Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” “of Prophecies,”
“Of Vain-glory,” and “Of Vicissitude of Things.”

Finally, we must not forget that when Bacon began to prepare
the second edition of the Essays toward 1607, the memory of his
work on the Advancement was still sufficiently fresh in his mind
so that even if he had desired to do so, he would doubtless have
found it difficult to escape entirely the influence of its style.

In view of these considerations we are perhaps justified in con¬
cluding that the change of manner in Bacon’s later essays was due
chiefly, not to any external influence or to any fundamental change
in their author’s mental constitution, but rather to the renewed
momentum given to writing in “methods” by his labors on the Ad¬
vancement of Learning — a momentum which all the more easily
carried over into the essays written after 1605 because of the close
relationship in purpose and theme which existed between many of
these essays and the work in which the distinguishing features of
their style were most clearly foreshadowed.

THE PICARO IN THE SPANISH DRAMA OF THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY

J. P. WlCKERSHAM CRAWFORD,

Professor of Romanic Languages, University of Pennsylvania

IN the study of the Spanish antecedents of Lazarillo de Tormes,
whose adventures first appeared in print, so far as we know, in
the year 1554, the comedies of the first half of the sixteenth
century have been almost entirely overlooked. We are not concerned
here with the picaro as a member of a particular social class, whose
status was occasionally defined by municipal regulations. The picaro
of literature might be a vagabond or thief, or for a time a respectable
member of society.1 The name of picaro was applied to Guzman de
Alfarache and his progeny because of their philosophy of life rather
than by virtue of their trade or the lack of one. The picaro knew
no other principle of conduct than the law of self-interest; over
against the selfishness of others he constantly asserted his own right
to food and drink ; life was for him a relentless battle and his sharp
wits were his only weapons ; his confidence in his own resourceful¬
ness raised him above the mere hewers of wood and drawers of
water, though he was keenly conscious of the social injustice of
which he was often a victim. From the literary standpoint, he was
an anti-hero ; the antithesis of the matchless knight and sentimental
lover.

Most of these characteristics are found in the person of Sem-
pronio in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.2 In the early

1 In his essay Los picaros cervantinos, published in a volume entitled
Cervantes y su obra, Madrid, 1916, Senor Bonilla y San Martin summarizes
as follows the chief characteristics of the picaro as found in Spanish litera¬
ture. He is a youth, poor and ragged ; a homeless vagabond ; he has no re¬
spect for the property of others ; he is not convinced that other men are better
than himself, and therefore readily assumes the role of censor of society; in
spite of his pessimism he is a merry fellow; he is superstitious, addicted to
wine, without a sense of honor, brave-hearted and cheerful in adversity. Senor
Bonilla regards him as a stoic and cynic combined.

3 The Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea first appeared in a version of
twenty-one acts in 1502, following a version in sixteen acts entitled Comedia

107

io8

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

part of the story he is an amusing rascal whose practical common
sense serves to emphasize the exaggerated sentimentality of his
master. When the grief-stricken Calisto refuses to allow Sempronio
to stay with him in the first act, the latter hesitates for a moment.
“Shall I leave him alone? or shall I go in to him? If I leave him
alone, he will kill himself. If I go in, he will kill me. Let him stay
alone, I care not. Better it be that he die, whose life is hateful
to him, than that I die, when life is pleasant unto me.” 1 This is a
fair measure of his loyalty. He shows no reluctance in joining
hands with Celestina to extort as much money as possible from
Calisto ; he stoutly asserts his readiness to stand by his master to
the death, but takes to his heels at the first sign of danger, and kills
Celestina herself over the division of the spoils.

His companion Parmeno gradually adopts the philosophy of the
picaro as a result of his association with Sempronio and Celestina.
The old hag undermines his loyalty to Calisto by provoking what
we now call class hatred. “Do not rely upon the vain promises of
masters who deprive servants of their substance with hollow and idle
promises. As the horse-leech that sucks blood, they are ungrateful,
commit injustice, grow forgetful of services and refuse reward.
Woe be unto him that grows old in service!”2 Parmeno still ob¬
jects that he wishes no ill-gotten gains, but his scruples are finally
overcome, and he joins wholeheartedly in the exploitation of his
master.

We can not here follow the careers of Sempronio’s descendants

in the long series of dialogued novels written in imitation of the

Tragic omedia de Calisto y M elibea, but must restrict ourselves to

their appearance in the drama. The picaro is found for the first

time in a Spanish play in the Comedia Himenea of Torres Naharro,

first published in a volume entitled Propaladia at Naples in 1517.®

Naharro made use of the twelfth, fourteenth and twentieth acts of

the Tragic omedia de Calisto y Melibea ,4 but substituted a happy

de Calisto y Melibea, first published in 1499. References are made to the
edition of Cejador y frauca, published at Madrid in 1913 with the title La
Lelesttna.

1 La Celestina, Act I, p. 37.

* Ibid., pp. 101-102.

**\ft0p-Dladta Bartolonfl de Torres Naharro, Vol. II, Madrid, 1900.

. 5omera-N£vaP°. 'Estudl° de la Comedia Himenea de Torres Na-

u!£lan(lC Revtf™> ^11 (1921). These correspond approximately to
the twelfth, fourteenth and fifteenth acts of the Comedia de Calisto y

THE PICARO IN THE SPANISH DRAMA 109

ending for the tragic denouement of the novel. Himeneo, like
Calisto, is a sentimental, somewhat ingenuous lover ; Febea and
Melibea have the same charming simplicity of character that is
capable of heroism when the occasion demands it, and Eliso and
Boreas correspond in general to Parmeno and Sempronio. Like
Parmeno, Eliso is devoted at first to his master’s interests, opposes
his extravagance and refuses an expensive gift as reward for his
services. Like Sempronio, Boreas has no such qualms of conscience
and calls his companion’s scruples downright nonsense. “He is an
arrant fool,” says Boreas in this first lesson in roguery, “who can
get two cloaks and is satisfied with one. You should remember
that Himeneo can not give us as much as we have really earned.”
But Eliso objects that however mean Himeneo may be, a better
master could hardly be found, adding that “all masters make loyal
servants suffer and are liberal with those who need no generosity.”
Boreas replies that because they are such tyrants as to withhold a
just reward for service, “We must take with both hands what they
give us, and even ask for what they have left.” These arguments con¬
vince Eliso that disinterested loyalty is foolish and he promises to
follow the advice of Boreas. The latter adds with a touch of bit¬
terness, “Let us be on our guard, for without doubt the hospital
awaits us in our old age. Wherefore, it is your duty, my brother,
to take an ell when they offer you an inch.” 1

In the Comedia Serafina of Torres Naharro, the lackey, Lenicio,
possesses an abundance of class spirit. When his master Floristan
accuses him of being only mildly devoted to his interests, Lenicio
replies with uncommon frankness : “You masters still think that
your servants are slaves. Well, I never go to market without stop¬
ping at a brothel on the way home to leave what I have pilfered from
you.” 2 Floristan asks him helplessly enough whether he realizes
the enormity of his sin, and Lenicio replies: “A servant is a fool
who waits for his master to pay when he himself can collect his
due.” Floristan asks him to pilfer at least honorably, and Lenicio
answers : “A servant who does not help himself when his master
withholds more than is fair, deserves to lose all that he has.”

The loyalty of Jusquino to Floribundo in Naharro’s Comedia
Calamita is likewise measured on a money basis. A money purge,

1 Propaladia, II, 41-44.

1 Propaladia, I, 153-54.

IIO

SCHELLING. ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

he tells Floribundo, will prove a remedy for all his troubles; he
offers to be the doctor and only demands complete obedience from
his patient. He is completely disillusioned. “You know,” he says
on one occasion to Libina, “in what dishonor and suffering men live
in these times in a world so devoid of kindness that there is neither
charity nor love nor courtesy in it. . . . As soon as a poor servant
wears a threadbare cloak, they refuse to make him a cook, even
though he deserve to be Pope. We have a chance now, if we take
it, to escape the hospital in our old age.” 1 The opportunity that he
speaks of is to get money from Floribundo by acting as go-between
with Calamita. He swears eternal loyalty to him, but seeks to
evade all responsibility when his master gets into trouble.

The lackeys in the plays of Torres Naharro already mentioned
seem more thoughtful than their prototypes in the Tragicomedia
de Calisto y Melibea, and the similarity of their attitude toward life
with the arraignment of social injustice that we find so often ex¬
pressed in Naharro’s lyrical verses leads us to believe that they
merely reflected the author’s own disillusions experienced at Rome.
At the same time, these picaros hold an important place in the con¬
struction of the plays. The lackeys Jusquino, Boreas, Eliso, Lenicio
and Faceto are true anti-heroes. Worldly-wise, unemotional and
resourceful, they are employed to throw into sharp relief the sen¬
timentality and sensibility of their masters, and their helplessness
when confronted by realities. These lackeys occupy exactly the
same position with respect to their masters as Lazarillo de Tormes,
for example, to Arnadis. The romances of chivalry and La cdrcel
de Amor have contributed to the sentimental education of the young
gallants, the lackeys have attended only the school of experience and
are accustomed to dealing with facts. They protest against extrava¬
gance in both language and conduct. “Good behavior consists in
moderation,” says Lenicio in the Comedia Serafina, “which is the
hinge of all good. Without it, virtue is vice, and with it, vice is
virtue.”2 The masters love madly, regardless of consequences;
the lackeys are usually cynical with regard to women and love.
“Growing old in a gentleman’s service and love-marriages are
flowers that the wind bears away,” 3 remarks Lenicio, and on an¬
other occasion he observes : “How many downright fools there are
who give their souls for women, seeking eternal regrets without any
1 Propaladia, II, 156-57. 2 Propaladta, I, 155. * Ibid_ p. ISI_

THE PICARO IN THE SPANISH DRAMA

1 1 1

pleasure in return.” 1 They believe that money will buy any woman’s
love, but that one must proceed with caution because a woman be¬
comes presumptuous when she realizes she has inspired affection in
a man. They have only contempt for the self-abasement of the ro¬
mantic lover. “It is no easy task to be loyal to a master who has
lost his wits,” 2 is Faceto’s comment in the Comedia Aquilana, upon
the intensity of his master’s passion. He ridicules the idea that
Aquilano is not worthy of Felicina’s love and has no patience with
his master’s romantic notion that he must win the lady’s hand with¬
out revealing the secret of his rank and fortune. This interplay
of sentiment and common sense, or of poetry and prose, is one of
the most delightful features of the plays of Torres Naharro.

Hardly a trace of the resourceful, witty and cynical rogue is
found in the Comedia Tidea of Francisco de las Natas, the Comedia
Tesorina and Comedia Vidriana of Jaime de Giiete, the anonymous
Farsa Rosiela and Agustin Ortiz’s Comedia Radiana, all of which
show the influence of Torres Naharro in the subject matter, versifi¬
cation and division into five acts. The subtle humor of Naharro,
based upon the contrast between sentimentality and common sense, is
replaced by crude horse-play. The lackeys are employed to carry on
the intrigue, but they are lacking in individuality and do not possess
sufficient intelligence to be rogues. Only in the Comedia Tesorina do
we find any criticism of social conditions. Here Pinedo is dis¬
satisfied with his lot and presents a bill of complaints against masters
in general, and his own in particular. “What a wretched life is
mine! Obliged to work night and day! We stay up until we hear
two o’clock strike, and if we ever get three hours of rest, it only
happens one day in ninety. And on trumped-up charges we are
turned out without a real, until we land finally in a hospital.” 3
This oft-repeated fear of a pauper’s death was probably realized
only too frequently.4

De estos tales
Se pueblan los hospitales,

Que no sabiendo donde ir,

En los palacios reales
Les es forzado morir.

1 Ibid., p. 157. 2 Ibid., II, 248.

* Teatro espanol del siglo XVI, edited by Urban Cronan, Madrid, 1913,

PP- 133-34-

4 Compare, for example, Cristobal de Castillejo’s Didlogo y discurso de la
vida de Corte, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, Vol. XXXII, p. 217.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The F arsa Salamantina 1 of Bartolome Palau presents an inno¬
vation in that both master and servant are picaros. There can be,
therefore, no contrast between sentimentality and common sense be¬
cause both characters are anti-heroes, and both have the same ethical
code or the lack of one. An impecunious student abandons his
studies at the University of Salamanca and on the road he meets
Soriano, a lackey recently discharged by his master and now be¬
come in consequence a regularly enrolled picaro ( ptcaro matricu-
lado). Soriano envies the student his good fortune and wishes that
he had learned a trade or gone to school because the hardships of
the servant’s life are many. “However well we serve them, they
discharge us as thieves; they keep back our wages and pay us with
a thousand insults. The poor wretch that serves a gentleman never
rests an hour, eats at odd times and never has a chance to drink.

. . . If he gets a little rest, it is only one day out of ninety.’’ 2 His
companion assures him that a student’s life has also many discom¬
forts and paints a graphic picture of life in the boarding-houses at
Salamanca.

These two rogues haven’t a cent between them, and determine
to make their fortune by an intrigue that recalls the opening scenes
of Los intereses creados. Encouraged by their success in petty
theft and attired in handsome clothes that they have rented, they
agree that the student try to win the love of a wealthy young lady
named Salamantina while Soriano, playing the part of a lackey,
shall spread reports regarding his master’s fortune and high sta¬
tion. When the lady is once in their power, they will take her
money and set her at a trade which will provide them with food
and drink. The student is completely successful in his ardent love-
making, which is but a mockery of Himeneo’s impassioned wooing,
and Salamantina promises her hand on condition of marriage. The
abduction of the lady is prevented by the opportune arrival of one
of her father s servants, but while the two rascals are thus deprived
of their chief prize, their disappointment is tempered by the ninety
ducats that fall to each as his share of the spoils. The earliest edi¬
tion is of the year 1552, but since it is practically certain that Palau’s
first play, Farsa llamada Custodia del hombre , was composed be¬
tween 154® 3-ud I547> and that the Farsa Salamantina was written

Edited by A. Morel-Fatio, Bulletin Hispanique II (1900)
Ibid., p. 251.

237-304.

THE pfCARO IN THE SPANISH DRAMA 113

while he was still a student, we may assign this play to approximately
the same period, that is, to at least a few years before the earliest
known edition of Lazarillo de Tormes. Most of the incidents of
the play might readily form a chapter of a picaresque novel.

No additions to our list of stage picaros are made by the four
comedies and two pastoral colloquies of Lope de Rueda, posthu¬
mously published in 1567, and this is the more surprising because
most, if not all, of them were probably written after the appearance
of Lazarillo de Tormes with its abundant material which Lope de
Rueda might have used to advantage. Even in the collection of
pasos published in the same year with the title El deleitoso, there is
only one scene that might possibly be called picaresque. This oc¬
curs in the first paso, and describes how the lackey Luquitas goes to
market and succeeds in stealing twenty-two maravedis from his
master in making purchases. Accompanied by the bobo Alameda,
they spend too much time at a pastry shop and are beaten by their
master when the bobo blurts out the real reason for their long de¬
lay in returning home. Luquitas has all the instincts of a fncaro,
but the character is not worked out with any detail. In the pasos
by Lope de Rueda and other authors included in the Registro de
representantes, there is a succession of tricks, deceptions and petty
thefts, but the rogues and thieves there presented are totally devoid
of the whimsical good nature, the intelligence and critical spirit of
the picaro as he appears in the plays of Torres Naharro and in the
picaresque novels.

The earliest plays that show a knowledge of Lazarillo de Tormes
are Los Menemnos and Cornelia of Juan de Timoneda, printed in
1559. In the first of these, the charlatan Averroyz is accompanied
by a boy named Lazarillo whose kinship to the famous rogue is
vouched for by the doctor himself who declares “he is the sharpest
boy in the world and is a brother of Lazarillo de Tormes, the one
who had three hundred and fifty masters.” 1 This stimulates our
curiosity, but we soon find that his part in the play is limited to a
few insignificant remarks. While the name of Lazarillo is not men¬
tioned in Timoneda’s Comedia Cornelia, its influence is far more
marked. In the fourth scene, the necromancer Pasquin is accom¬
panied by a sharp-witted youth named Longanares, who realizes that
his master is better acquainted with the seven deadly sins than with
1 Obras completas de Juan de Timoneda, Vol. I, Valencia, 1911, p. 93.

1 14 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

the seven liberal arts, and does not hesitate to comment wittily upon
his master’s conversation with his clients. By accident he overhears
the secret of Fulvio’s feigned illness and he promises Pasquin to
communicate important matters to him on condition that he receive
one third of the fee. Pasquin reproves him for his cupidity, adding
that he has already made him his heir, but Longanares is skeptical
and prefers a bird in the hand to a vulture on the wing. The whole
scene is conceived in the spirit of the picaresque novel.

Two of the pasos published by Timoneda in a volume entitled
Turiana (1564-1565) 1 clearly show the influence of Lazarillo de
Tormes. In the Entremes de un ciego, y un mogo, y un pobre, a
boy named Hernandillo is leading a blind man who is asking for
alms. His prayer sheets seem to be in little demand and the blind
man throws the blame for this upon his guide. The latter is un¬
concerned over the threats of a thrashing and makes sport of his
master when he tries to pitch his voice on a particularly pathetic key.
A competitor appears in the person of another beggar ; they begin to
abuse one another and finally come to blows.

The masterpiece of what might be called the picaresque comedy
of the sixteenth century is the Passo de dos ciegos y un mogo, in¬
cluded in the same volume, and intended to introduce a Christmas
play. The prologue is recited by Palillos, who hopes to find a master
in the audience. He is acquainted with over twenty trades, and
although he would prefer to be a taffy-vendor or scullion, he will
accept almost any sort of a job. He wittily narrates his qualifica¬
tions. He is slow to return from errands; he rises late; he can
break what is whole and can get his hands on bread when hungry;
no one can make him eat when he has already had enough. He is
not a thief, but was obliged to steal six ducats from his last master,
a blind man who nearly starved him. As he describes the details
of his theft, two blind men approach asking for alms, and in one
of them, Martin Alvarez, Palillos discovers his late master. The two
beggars meet and begin to talk of professional matters. Pero
Gomez notes that his companion has no guide and Martin narrates
his experience with Palillos, whom he characterizes as the greatest
rascal he ever saw. Palillos overhears the compliment, and decides
to have some fun at their expense. Pero remarks that it is safer to
keep one’s money on one’s person than to leave it at home for thieves
1 Included in the Obras de Juan de Timoneda, Valencia, 1911.

THE PICARO IN THE SPANISH DRAMA 115

to steal, and after Martin has failed to guess where his companion
hides his money, the latter lowers his voice and whispers that he
keeps it in his hat-band. “How many ducats have you there?” asks
Martin. “As many as five or six or seven,” replies the owner. At
that moment Palillos snatches Pero’s hat and runs away, while Pero
hotly accuses his companion of the theft which Martin indignantly
denies. The same trick was described by Timoneda in his twelfth
patrana, but the dramatic version is far superior. In the arrange¬
ment of the incidents and in the skilful portraiture of Palillos, it can
stand comparison with any chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes.

We have virtually a dramatization of a part of the first chapter
of the latter work in the first scene of Sebastian de Horozco’s Repre¬
sentation de la historia evangelica del capitulo nono de Sand Joan.1
A blind beggar accuses his guide, named Lazarillo, of pocketing food
intended for himself. “Is it bacon?” asks his master. “By my word,
I smell it ! Give it to me !” “I think it will hurt you,” answers
Lazarillo. “I too must gnaw on some of the manna that God gives
us.” “Don’t I give you plenty to eat?” asks the blind man-. “You
gave me a bone without any meat,” replies his guide. “You eat and
drink enough for eight,” says the beggar. “I am always hungry,”
answers Lazarillo. “A fellow like me can’t live on air.” As the
quarrel reaches its height, Lazarillo lets him strike the wall of a
house. The beggar cries out with pain, and Lazarillo says grimly :
“Since you smelled the bacon, why didn’t you smell the corner ?” The
whole spirit of the scene, as well as the verbal similarity of the last
words with the phrase “Olistes la longaniza y no el poste?” point
to a close relationship between the two works. It has even been
suggested that Horozco is the author of Lazarillo de Tormes ,2 but
while the question can not be definitely settled at present because of
the uncertainty regarding the date of composition of Horozco’s play,
there is every reason to believe that the novel was composed many
years before Horozco began to write.3

In the period immediately preceding the appearance of Lope de
Vega, we note the tendency to divorce comedy from real life and

1 Published in the Cancionero de Sebastian de Horozco, Seville, 1874.

a Julio Cejador y Frauca, Historia dc la lengua y literature castellana, II,
238-50.

3 E. Cotarelo y Mori, El licenciado Sebastian de Horozco y sus obras,
Madrid, 1916, pp. 40-44. See also the notes of Charles P. Wagner to Louis
How’s English translation of Lazarillo de Tormes, New York, 1917, pp. 131-
32.

n6 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

therefore in the plays of Juan de la Cueva and bis contemporaries,
the pxcaro does not appear. It is likely, however, that he continued
to be a welcome figure in the entremeses for he is frequently found
in plays of that type in the following century, and there seems to
be no doubt that in the creation of the gracioso Lope de Vega uti¬
lized the ptcara as fun-maker and anti-hero, giving him many of the
traits that we have already found in the plays of Torres Naharro
and in the Farsa Salamantina.

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON
Morris W. Croll

Professor of English. Princeton University

THE decade beginning just before 1570 is clearly indicated as
the time at which the Anti-Ciceronian, or “Attic,” movement
first arrived at a program and became conscious of its connec¬
tion with a general change of intellectual interests that was coming
over the world. It was the beginning of a century in which, in spite
of many oppositions, at first from a dying generation, and later from
a generation just coming to birth, it was to dictate the prevailing form
of prose style in all the countries of Europe. In the career of Muret,
for instance, we are able to mark with definiteness the late sixties
and the early seventies as the time when he first arrived at a complete
sense of his own meaning and mission; the succeeding years of his
life were spent in working out the philosophical implications of the
Anti-Ciceronian rhetoric in moral and political science.1

It was not only Muret’s conversion, however, that made this the
decisive moment in the history of the movement. Muret was then
too old to make the world clearly aware of his changed intentions :
his record was confusing. Moreover, other men of his generation,
almost equally authoritative, had taken the opposite direction to his.
In the North particularly, whence it seemed that new impulses must
come, in the great Protestant countries of Germany and England, the
leading humanists, Ascham and Car, Sturm, Melanchthon, and
Camerarius were all Ciceronian, mildly and moderately so, it is true,
since Erasmus had spoken, but still definitely in the tradition of

JThe present essay is meant to follow, one with the title Marc-Antoine
Muret and Attic Prose, which appears in a current number (1923) of the
Publications of the Modern Language Association. In that essay I have tried
to show the relations of the Anti-Ciceronian movement to the thought of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As regards the relations between this
movement and its models in antiquity, see an earlier essay: “Attic Prose in
the Seventeenth Century,” which appeared in Studies in Philology , 1921.

117

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

118

rhetorical education and eminently puristic in their theory of style.
The situation was not clear and the world might be going in either
direction for all one could tell. It all depended on what the young
men would say, what formulas they would adopt, what challenges
they would respond to ; and it is chiefly because of what was thought
and said by two men who were both comparatively young at that time
that we are able to date the beginning of the Anti-Ciceronian period
at approximately 1570.

These two were Joest Lips (better known as Justus Lipsius)
and Montaigne. In 1567, Montaigne was thirty-four years old, but
not yet an author or a philosopher ; Lipsius was twenty years old, and
had already published. We will consider the latter first.

Justus Lipsius

His Discovery of the Stoic Model

There is no scholar of the Renaissance concerning whom the
opinion of scholars has undergone so radical a change in recent years
as Justus Lipsius, of Leyden and Louvain. His association, from
15S6 onward, with the Jesuits of Louvain won him the hatred and
abuse of Protestant partisans in the Northern countries on the other
hand, the more orthodox of his own party regarded him with constant
suspicion and refrained from acknowledging their real intellectual
indebtedness to him because it was believed that he had imbibed from
his Stoic masters in antiquity doctrines dangerous to the faith of a
Christian . and, finally, the shadow of academic disapproval always
rested upon his literary doctrines, even during the period when they
were enjoying almost unrivaled success in the actual practice of the
world. T,or these and other reasons his name appears much oftener
in the seventeenth century in hostile than in friendly allusion, though
it was recognized that he deserved his place beside Scaliger and
C asaubun in the intellectual triumvirate of his time; and modern
scholars were content until a few years ago to accept the judgment
of Ins contemporary toes at their face value. It was sometimes
recalled, with facile humor, that there was a Lepidus in the Roman
triumvirate; and it was the custom to hold him up to scorn as a

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 119

typical linguistic pedant insensible to the philosophy and literature
of the ancient authors whom he edited. These were strange judg¬
ments to be passed on the philosopher who has now come to be
known as “the founder of seventeenth-century Neo-Stoicism” and
the writer who must finally take an almost equal place with Mon¬
taigne and Bacon among the founders of the prose-style of the
seventeenth century.1

The stages in Lipsius’ development as a philosopher can be clearly
discerned. His history properly began, when he was twenty-one
years old, with his visit to Muret at Rome in 1568, though at that
time he had already won considerable reputation as a linguist and
rhetorician. The first result of this encounter was his quick, — if we
may believe him, his instantaneous, — conversion from a purely lit¬
erary and rhetorical learning to a realistic — or, as we should say, a
positivistic — study of politics. He began at once the intense and
rapid labors which bore fruit, after only seven years, in his famous
edition of Tacitus (1575), and a little later in the important com¬
pilation known as Six Books of Politics. These works won him a
reputation as a “politician,” or student of prudentia, which was never
equaled or corrected, at least in Italy, by the fame of his later work.
The Politics unfortunately won him also the hatred of most scholars
of the North by its advocacy of the policy of “fire and sword” in
dealing with heresy, though a careful student of his mind will be
convinced that his ruthlessness, like the orthodoxy of Montaigne and
Browne, was founded in skepticism and not in bigotry.

These first works do not, however, represent his matured interests.
They reflect directly the influence of Muret, just as we may discover
in all the first part of his career the mobility of mind, the physical
restlessness, the extravagance of wit veiling an inward dissatisfac¬
tion, which are observable in his master. The time of his full self-
discovery may be fixed with some certainty at the point of his career
when he severed his connection with the Protestant University at
Leyden and deliberately chose a life of quiet and retirement as
teacher in his own Louvain college. There was an interval in which

*1 have used again, in this section, some of the materials more fully
elaborated in an essay, “Juste Lipse et le Mouvement Anti-Ciceronien,” which
appeared in the Revue du Seizieme Siecle (formerly Etudes Rabelaisiennes) ,
in July, 1914. An excellent and full study of Lipsius’ philosophical doctrine
and its influence will be found in L. Zanta, "La Renaissance du Stoicisme au
XVI Siecle” (vol. 5 of Bibl. litt. de la Ren.), Paris, 1914. See also Strowski,
De Pascal a Montaigne, Vol. I.

120

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

he was received as an honored guest at several German courts and
universities, and was offered more than one brilliant and conspicuous
position of public activity. He deliberately chose to retire to the
house on a quiet side street of Louvain not far from the college,
where he spent the rest of his life in the placid orderliness that he
describes in his letters, teaching a small number of chosen students,
walking in the country with his Scotch dog Mops, and cultivating

his tulips.

In the Dc Constantia, his first work of Stoic philosophy, he at¬
tributes his choice of retirement and his study of “apathy” to the
trouble of his time, and the varied spectacle of human suffering that
he has witnessed in the devastated towns and country regions of the
Netherlands. But the roots of seventeenth-century Stoicism lie much
deeper than the events of a generation. Once started by Muret in
the way of a naturalistic study of public and private morality, Lip-
sius could never have rested until he had attained the formula of
spiritual recollection and cure which his age required. Having found
this, he had found himself at last, and the rest of his life was devoted
to Seneca and the doctrines of Stoic sapicntia d

The progress of his literary ideas was like that of his philosophy,
and seems always to have kept a step in advance of it. Like Muret,
he blundered into the wrong track at the beginning of his career—
the back-track of Ciceronianism. In 1567, having scarcely finished
his studies at Louvain, he published a volume of precocious learning
containing three books of Varicr Lcctiones. It is dedicated to the
mighty Cardinal Granvelle — so high does he dare to aspire already —
in copious Ciceronian periods, indistinguishable from many other
examples of the same style produced by the rhetorical humanists of
the sixteenth century. But his conversion was early, instantaneous,
and thorough. Muret had gradually divined the new program of
studies, had worked out their relations one to another, had dis¬
covered their appropriate rhetorical medium; Lipsius’ task was
merely to understand the meaning of his message, to develop the
implications in ir which Muret himself had not dared to reveal, and
to devote the energy and fire of his youth to its propagation. It
was in 1568, only a year after his Ciceronian debut, that he met

Of course his Manuduciio ad Philosophiam Stoicam (written as a prepa¬
ration for his edition of Seneca) had a greater influence upon the better-
e^e“erePa P ' bUt the Dt ConsUntia relied a larger audience

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 121

Muret in Cardinal Hippolito d’Este’s palace at Tivoli, and a few
days later wrote to him as a disciple to a master. Muret has found
the true way of study: nothing more Attic has ever met Lipsius’ eyes
than the letter he has just received from him. A year later Muret
wrote, admitting him, as it were, to the mysteries. At Tivoli, he
said, it is true that we live in all the delights of the senses — a truly
Phaeacian life — but there are none who delight in the same studies
that you and I enjoy. There is something of the strange secrecy
and sense of danger in this correspondence that is often to be noted
as characteristic of the Anti-Ciceronian movement ; and it is not un¬
likely that Muret’s description of the sensual life of Tivoli alludes in
a veiled style to the rhetorical, purely literary tastes of the patrons
whom he was serving, contrasting them with his own enthusiasm for
the virile and “modern” studies which he did not dare to profess
openly.1

Lipsius’ resolve is taken at once. Political and moral science, not
rhetoric; Attic style, not Ciceronian, shall be the objects of his effort.
And he begins to work on an edition of Tacitus. But how shall he
make the transition decently from the opinions that the public still
thinks he holds to those he has actually espoused? It was an em¬
barrassing situation for a young man who had already attained repu¬
tation as a stylist ; and we can follow — not without enlightenment —
the steps of his cautious preparation. First he publishes nothing of
any import for seven years after the date of his first work; and then
he comes out, in a new preface, in 1574, with the astonishing state¬
ment that Plautus’ old style has more savor for him than Cicero’s.
The quaint and ancient words, the piquant realism of this author
made him a favorite of Anti-Ciceronians from Cujas to Gui Patin;
he was tonic to minds suffering from the lassitude of a long season
of purism. But Lipsius is careful to give the air of a whimsical
and ingenuous weakness to his preference ; and in the same tone he
continues to speak of the style he uses in this new work, the
Qucestiones Epistolicce. While he professes that his subject com¬
pels him here to employ a style more pointed and significant than
he has heretofore employed, he seeks a justification for his new
manner in the Letters of Cicero.

The disingenuousness of all this is apparent when we consider

1 See an account of this correspondence, with references, in “M.-A. Muret
and Attic Prose,” Publ. of Mod. Lang. Assoc., as above.

122

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

that his Tacitus must already have been in the press when these
words were written. The true account of the style he employs in
the Qucestiones is contained in a letter to a friend, and the words are
worth quoting as one of the best descriptions of the new Attic.
“I am afraid,” he says, “of what you will think of this work (the
Qucestiones). For this is a different kind of writing from my earlier
style, without showiness, without luxuriance, without the Tullian
concinnities ; condensed everywhere, and I know not whether of too
studied a brevity. But this is what captivates me now. They cele¬
brate Timanthes the painter because there was always something
more to be understood in his works than was actually painted. I
should like this in my style.” Both the terms of criticism in this
passage and the style in which it is written come from Seneca.

Of course the air of mystery could not long be maintained after
the appearance of his Tacitus in 1575. It is true that he continued
to write to his literary intimates, even to Montaigne, as if he and
they had been initiated into an esoteric cult, a secret order of taste
and ideas, which involved them in opinions contrary to those they
were bound to profess in public and odious to vulgar and orthodox
intelligences.1 But this curious attitude continued to be character¬
istic of certain phases of the Anti-Ciceronian movement during at
least two generations. The world soon became aware, through his
voluminous and international correspondence, that Lipsius was a man
with a philosophical and literary mission. Almost immediately after
the appearance of the Tacitus he let it be known that he would
devote the rest of his life to preparing an edition of Seneca. This
resolve he faithfully carried out, and the great work did not appear
until 1605, the year before his death. It was then already world-
famous, however, and almost immediately attained a currency such
as few works of learning have enjoyed. It was the chief instrument
ot the extraordinary diffusion of Seneca’s influence throughout the
seventeenth century, and was so closely identified with the study of
the Stoic philosopher that people sometimes spoke of “Lipsius” when
they meant the works of Seneca. There seems to have been doubt
dunn- the years following his death whether his influence was to
be of more use to the imitators of Tacitus or to the imitators of
Seneca. But there can be none in the mind of a modern student
wno studies the works of the many writers who derive from him.

1 Lipsius’ Epp. Misc., II, no. 87.

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 123

He and Montaigne are the chief sources of the Senecan literary
mode, and his own style is obviously formed by a slight exaggeration
of Seneca’s point and brevity, and unfortunately a great exaggeration
of his play upon words.

In the course of twenty-five years of preparation for his Seneca,
Lipsius’ program of studies gradually enlarged and at the same time
defined itself. He found himself involved, like Muret, in the enter¬
prise of rehabilitating the Latin masters of the silver age, but with
the difference that his interests were almost wholly limited to prose
writers — he is like Bacon, Browne, Balzac, Pascal, and many other
literary masters of the seventeenth century in this respect — and that
he was much clearer in his literary purposes than Muret. What
these purposes were is described in a passage from a Latin eulogy
composed by a Mechlin judge, a literary disciple of Lipsius, imme¬
diately after his death. The reader will perhaps be rewarded for
his patience in enduring Rivius’ style for a few sentences, — some¬
what mitigated in translation, it is true, — for the sake of the informa¬
tion he conveys, and also because the passage will show that a certain
kind of Asianism arises, as Cicero observed, from an exaggeration
of the very qualities called Attic. Rivius is plainly one of those
disciples of Lipsius, often mentioned in contemporary criticism, who
imitated only the faults of his master.

Declaring, Rivius says, that he existed for the good of the State, not the
State for his good, he (Lipsius) decided at the beginning to save the lives
of his own kind by his labors, to recover health to the sick by his minis¬
trations, to restore their original possessions to those who had been unjustly
despoiled, and to liberate them from their chains. It was for this purpose
that he visited all the prisons and took note of Seneca, the tragic poet, Velleius
Paterculus, the famous Pliny, that once-celebrated panegyrist of Trajan, and
many others besides, wearing the chains and the dress of prisoners, living
there in mud and ordure, branded with the red-hot iron, shaven, half-dead.
In the same wretched gang he saw also Valerius Maximus, so unlike himself,
so unlike his name.

. . . And two prisoners were particularly noteworthy as having been un¬
justly condemned — L. A. Seneca and G. Cornelius Tacitus. These men, who
had held consular rank, he beheld crawling out of I know not what barathrum,
what cave of Polyphemus, or rather what cavern peopled with tigers and
panthers. ... To Lipsius, who took pity on them and demanded to know
why men who had served the public good as citizens had been thrown into
chains, why they were bound who had attached all humanity in bonds to
themselves by their services, and ought to be held in the hands and in the

124 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

hearts of princes ; why they lay darkened in filth who had cast a light beyond
the limits of the world, beyond nature— the dazzling light of prudentia and
sapientia; to Lipsius, inquiring thus. . . . (The period continues to much
greater length.1

Rivius’ words are valuable as indicating the full scope and de¬
liberateness of Lipsius’ innovations. They help us to understand,
for instance, why several minor contemporaries of Tacitus and
Seneca enjoyed so much more favor in the seventeenth century- than
they have done since: why Valerius Maximus is so often quoted by-
Montaigne, Jonson, and Browne, Velleius Paterculus by the con-
cettisti in prose, and the younger Pliny by panegyrists and students
of “point.” But they also reveal the fact that Lipsius limited his
charity to authors of this school and century. Though his classi¬
cism is deliberately not Augustan, it is a true classicism, and he care¬
fully- avoids the dangerous mistake which Muret did not sufficiently
guard his followers against, and which the “libertine” prosaists of
the seventeenth century were frequently to make, of frolicking anew
in the semi-barbarism of the “low Latin” style.

(&)

His Place in Seventeenth Century Culture

Of course Lipsius was not the sole founder of the stoical phi¬
losophy of the seventeenth century or even of the Senecan imitation
which accompanied it in prose literature. Du Vair, Montaigne, and
Charron had all discovered the path of renunciation and self-
dependent morals before him or without his aid. But the clearness
and exclusiveness of his program, his international authority as a
humanist, and his use of the new prose-model in the authoritative
Latin language gave the impetus to the Stoic philosophy and style
which earned them into every part of Europe and almost every
lettered circle of society. He soon had many followers among pro¬
fessed scholars at the universities who dared to brave the imputation
of heterodoxy. But the greatest success of his program (though he
himself always wrote in the ancient tongue) was won in the more

1 Rivius’ discourse appears in a volume called /. Lipsii Principals Lit¬
ter anus issued by Moretus during the year following Lipsius’ death It con¬
tains a fine portrait. '

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 125

open fields of the vernacular languages and the popular philosophy
of laymen. Most conspicuous among his professed disciples was
Francisco Quevedo, the young Spanish nobleman who had already
won a brilliant reputation in burlesque fiction. There was a corre¬
spondence between the two men during Lipsius’ last years in which
Quevedo hailed Lipsius as the hierophant of a new mystery in terms
that recall the letter that Lipsius had written to Muret forty years
before. To Lipsius he owes the discovery of the way that he will
henceforth follow throughout his life.1 His writings soon showed
what he meant ; for he became the consistent and enthusiastic ex¬
ponent of Christian Stoicism in many works of philosophy in Spanish
and Latin, in which Job, Socrates, Cato, and Seneca appear as the
saints and heroes of one dispensation. When one reads the bold
and extravagant pages in which he equalizes pagan and Hebraic
models of morality one easily understands why Lipsius himself nar¬
rowly escaped the Index, and why he felt it necessary to destroy his
dissertation called Thrascas in defense of the right of suicide, which
had won, even though unpublished, a dangerous notoriety. Que-
vedo's discipleship was complete ; for he adopted not only Lipsius’
philosophy, but also his literary style and his devotion to the masters
of silver-age Latinity. “Mi Seneca, mi Lucano, mi Juvenali,’’ he
exclaims, in a kind of rapture. It was a literary program which
gained peculiar plausibility in Spain from the fact that Seneca and
Lucan had been natives of that country. The somber dignity of the
Spanish character was believed to be as friendly to Stoic ideals of
conduct as the Spanish love of “emphasis” was to the significant
rhetoric of the first century.

The impression made by Lipsius upon England was almost as
great, however. His dialogue Of Constancy was translated and pub¬
lished in 1593 by Sir John Stradling, a minor author who had a part
also in disseminating the taste for Martial and the epigram in this
decade. Jonson studied the political, the rhetorical, and the Stoic
writings of Lipsius, and may have learned from them some of the
admiration for the two Senecas which is displayed in his prose and

1 Quevedo’s letters are in the Sylloge Epistolarum a znris illustribus scrip -
tarum, epp. 835 and 836; Lipsius’ in Vincentii Marineri Op. Om., Turnoni,
1633, p. 340 and p. 404. The latter references are from E. Merimee, La Vie
et les CEuvres de Fr. Quevedo, Paris, 1886. These letters do not appear in
Lipsius’ voluminous collected correspondence.

126

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

poetry alike, and some of the Stoic philosophy which he expounds
or translates- — so admirably in many a passage of his verse.1 A
Senecanism more obsequious to Jacobean defects of taste is revealed
in Bishop Hall’s Epistles and Meditations. It is hard to believe that
these works have not been directly influenced by the Belgian scholar,
whom Hall met in person, encountered in sectarian controversy, and
mentioned frequently in his writings. Lipsius’ influence at least
appears far and wide in many other English moral writings of the
century; and it is recorded that his letters were sometimes used as
Latin texts in English schools.

These are remarkable instances of Lipsius’ authority, yet the
knowledge of its range and power must chiefly be won, for reasons
that have been explained, from the vigorous opposition it aroused.
The attacks made by his opponents during his lifetime are of little
value to the historian, because of the religious prejudices that mingle
with and obscure their literary purposes. Henri Estienne, who was
himself an Anti-Ciceronian, — though more nearly akin to Montaigne
than to Lipsius, — published in his old age a long and fantastic book
De Lipsii Latinitate. But he has so entangled the literary doctrines
of Lipsius with the intrigues of Spain and the Ligue and the sup¬
posed alliance of the Catholic powers with the Turk that no modern
reader can hope or care to discover his exact meanings. Scaliger is
a better critic, and has left the first intelligent description of the new
Senecan style by an opponent. But he was the official voice of
Protestant literary orthodoxy, and his appointment to the chair of
rhetoric at Leyden vacated by Lipsius was probably meant to have
both sectarian and rhetorical significance.2

Two decades later the cause of correct classicism in style rests
in different hands, the hands of the Jesuit rhetoricians who have taken
charge of the literary education of the French court and society.
To rally the taste of their time to pure Augustanism is the task of
Father Gaussin and Father Vavasseur, and the tendencies they are
hopelessly struggling against are chiefly those that were set going

The facts are recorded in Professor Schelling’s admirable edition of
Jonson s Discoveries, 1892, to which Castelain’s edition. 1906, makes some
usetul additions See a series of articles, in various periodicals, by Professor
‘t2^T>S u °t ^-’nivers^y on Jonson’s classical adaptations

bather Nicholas Caussin, De Eloquentia Sacra et Humana, 1619; Father
b. Vavasseur, Oratio Tcrtia, pro vetere dicendi genere coritra noz.'um., in his
Up. Om., ed. r7C>9, PP 201-209. The novum genus is the Anti-Ciceronian, the
post-Augustan, which has become almost universal in Vavasseur’s time

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 127

by Lipsius and his school.1 It is still so in the middle of the cen¬
tury, when Balzac is the arbiter of taste; Montaigne and Lipsius are
the protagonists of the tradition from which he seeks — in vain — to
disengage himself. And even a generation later, Bouhours attributes
both good and bad elements in the prevailing modes of style to
Lipsius’ teaching.2 It is remarkable that a model set in Latin writ¬
ing by a philologist should have had so much power in determining
the form of prose-style in several of the living languages. But the
explanation is clear: Lipsius provided the model of a Stoic style.

Ill

Montaigne

The Founder of Libertine Style

There is a striking similarity between the moral experience of
Montaigne at the time of his retirement and that through which
Lipsius passed more gradually in arriving at the ultimate form of
his thought. He too was touched with the melancholy of the late
Renaissance. His confessed aim in his retirement was to study it
and come to terms with it ; and the method of his study in the first
phase of his philosophical development was purely Stoic. The essays
which we can prove to have been written during the first five or six
years after his retirement are as hke in tone and spirit to the Stoical
treatises of Lipsius as the writings of two authors working inde¬
pendently are ever likely to be. The essay on Solitude, for instance,
is a kind of companion-piece or complement to Lipsius’ dialogue on
Constancy.

Rhetorically, too, Montaigne effected his escape from humanistic
orthodoxy through the Stoic doorway; and he asserted his freedom
with more boldness and promptitude, perhaps actually became con¬
scious of it at an earlier date, than Lipsius. He is in no doubt, even
in the earliest of his Essays, about his distaste for Cicero’s style;
and indeed is the only Anti-Ciceronian who dares to express his inde¬
pendence with perfect frankness. “Fie upon that eloquence,” he

1Josephi Scaligeri Poemata Omnia, No. 14; also, in Scaligerana 11, the
brief dictum, under the caption Lipsius, male scribit.

2 Father Dominique Bouhours, La Maniere de Bien Penser dans les
Outages d’ Esprit, passim (see the copious Index). There is some discussion
of Bouhours’ criticism in my essay “Attic Prose” (cited above), p. 125.

128

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

says, when speaking of Cicero, “that makes us in love with itself,
and not with the thing.” The very beauty of Cicero’s language, the
faultlessness of his oratorical rhythm, is the defect he finds in him,
just as Erasmus had found him too perfect. “He will sometimes, ’
he admits, “confound his numbers ; but it is seldom.” “As for me,
I like a cadence that falleth shorter, cut like Iambics.” 1 He may
make his opposition more particular and varied in his later writings ;
he cannot make it more clear and positive than it is in the period
between 1572 and 1576.

But he has not yet attained the characteristic independence of
his matured opinions. Like Lipsius’, his opposition to Cicero’s sole
authority is that of a school. The terms of his polemic are all Stoic
terms ; the books that he reads, he says, in words that are almost
identical with a later phrase of Lipsius, are only those that will make
him “more zirise and sufficient, not more worthy or eloquent” ; 2 and
the authors who have won away his admiration from “the master of
those who speak” are also those in whom he has studied the Stoic
philosophy which meets his moral need at this time : Seneca and, in
a less degree, Lucan. The “soldatesque” style of Caesar, it is true,
also commands his special admiration ; for what is it but the language
of a great Stoic in action ; but he is after all a writer, that is to say,
a rhetorician, and as a model for his own imitation Seneca alone could
serve his turn. Upon this model, in fact, his style was formed in
his early writing, and the general character it took at that time was
never radically changed, as he himself observed, even though his
theory of style and his tastes passed through more than one phase
of development in succeeding years. Pasquier described him as un
autre Seneque de notre longue, Pere Garasse as un Seneque en
dcsordre , and the careful analysis of his style by many modern critics
has but confirmed these judgments of an earlier day. His style, says
Sainte-Beuve, is a tissue of metaphors,” and, as regards the other
conspicuous trait of a Senecan style, Etienne Pasquier has truly said

of his book that it is “un vrai seminaire de belles et notables sen¬
tences.”

If Montaigne had advanced no further in the development of his
moral and rhetorical theory than the stage he had reached in 1576
he would not have become the pioneer in a new phase of modern

’ I, 40 ( Consideration sur Ciceron).
Ibid.

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 129

thought. His talent, his inimitable skill would of course have made
his writings more familiar to the world than those of Muret and
Lipsius ; but he would still have occupied a place similar to theirs and
about equal to it in the history of the rationalist movement of the
age.

Doubtless his freedom from the obligations of a professional
consistency was a cause that his influence was not bounded by these
limitations ; some would prefer to say that it was merely an effect of
the native superiority of genius to any circumstances whatever ; and
perhaps the truest statement of all would be that his preference of an
unrelated freedom to the embarrassments of a defined career was in
and of itself the decisive manifestation of his genius, including all
the rest as its natural consequence. At all events, he passed beyond
the limits of the “new kind of learning,” even at the time when
Muret and Lipsius were still seeking its exact academic formulae and
definitions. By the time his first volume appeared, in 1580, he had
already renounced systematic stoicism — though he never moved out
of the zone of intellectual and literary interests into which his stoic
study had introduced him — and had found his way to the main
highway of modern thought, which leads directly from Petrarch and
Erasmus to the liberal skepticism of the eighteenth century. He had
discovered that the progress of rationalism meant much more than
a change of orthodoxies, meant nothing less in fact than the full
exercise of curiosity and the free play of individual differences.1

A change of literary tastes kept pace with this philosophic de¬
velopment. Students of Montaigne’s Essais have discovered that
the publication of Amyot’s translations of Plutarch’s works, and
particularly of Les CEmres Morales et Meslees in 1572, had a
decisive effect in this respect upon all his later work. The full
meaning of the extraordinary delight he always took thenceforth in
the reading of this work cannot be discussed here : we need only ob¬
serve that it was quite as much an effect as a cause of the progress
that was going on in his literary opinions. In an addition to his last
volume, in the edition of 1588, he said that of all the authors he knew
Plutarch was the one who “best mingled art with nature,” 2 and the

1 The change of Montaigne from Stoicism to Libertinism is well treated
in Strowski’s work on him and also in his De Montaigne a Pascal, vol. I.
Professor Villey’s Les Sources et revolution des Essais provides the exact
details necessary.

a III, 6 (Des Coches), near the beginning.

1 3o SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

phrase exactly describes the literary ideal toward which he was
tending throughout his career. He was always in quest of the
natural man in himself, the free individual self who should be the
ultimate judge of the opinions of all the sects and schools ; and as the
natural complement of this philosophic enquiry he was always feeling
his way at the same time toward a theory of style which should allow
the greatest possible scope to the expression of differences of indi¬
vidual character, or, in other words, the greatest possible naturalness
of style that is consistent with the artificial limits necessarily imposed
upon all literary composition. We can observe through all the stages
of his development a steady approximation to such a theory ; but in
the latest editions of his Essais he has worked out its formulae with
surprising definiteness, and has become, both as teacher and model,
the initiator of a particular tendency within the general bounds of
the Anti-Ciceronian movement which is destined to have even greater
consequences in literary history than the Stoic model of style de¬
scribed by Lipsius. To this tendency we are justified in giving the
name “Libertine” — though the term is new in literary criticism —
because it not only indicates the connection between the kind of
prose-style which it produces and the philosophy to which it is
related, hut also exactly describes the character of this prose-style
itself.

The freedom of Montaigne’s literary opinions was partly due, as
we have already observed, to his deliberate choice of a career free
from official responsibilities : he became a “man writing for men. ’
But it was also due in large measure to the fact that he was the first
of the Anti-Ciceronian leaders to use a vernacular language in his
writings ; and this is so great a point of difference that it cannot be
passed over in a discussion of seventeenth century prose-style.

(b)

Latin and the Vernacular Tongues 1575-1625

The last quarter of the sixteenth century was the period when
the literary claims and pretensions of Latin and the modern languages
were most evenly balanced, when it was easiest to pass from one to
the other without a change of subject-matter or style. Before that
time there had been a fairly clear, though by no means a deliberate,
differentiation of their uses. 1 he chief artistic use of the vernacular

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 131

in the sixteenth century had been to express the surviving medieval¬
ism of the culture of that age. It was the language, for instance,
of what had been perhaps the most general medium of medieval
literary expression, the sermon j it was the language of a multitude
of romantically-retold tales of both antiquities, in which the fading
ideals and customs of chivalry were adapted to an age of courtiers ;
it was the language of courtly ceremonial and show ; it was the me¬
dium in which the medieval book of etiquette and universal instruc¬
tion enjoyed a brief revival. It reflected, in brief, the customs of a
courtly life which had not been modified in its essential features by
the intellectual effort of the Renaissance. On the other hand, what¬
ever was really new and forward-looking in the Renaissance found
its prose-expression in the ancient tongue. Some humanists, it is
true, foresaw the modern uses of their mother-languages: Bembo,
Du Bellay, Ascham, for instance. Yet their writings are not repre¬
sentative of the usual vernacular prose of their time ; and there is
little distortion in the statement that in 1550 all serious, modern
thought was expressed in Latin, all that was traditional, or merely
popular, in its character tended to find its way into vernacular prose.

One hundred years after that date the progress of modernism
had reversed these relations in most respects. The usual language
of serious criticism, and even of philosophy, had become English,
French, or Italian ; and, what is more important, the subject of lit¬
erary criticism had become chiefly the vernacular languages and their
usages ; Latin was already the language of a dead literature, whose
chief value was to enrich the native styles with romantic allusion,
heroic images, and far-echoing rhythms.

In these observations there is of course nothing new, and the
purpose of reviving them here is to call attention to a fact which
scholarship has not yet clearly enough taken account of, that between
the two termini that have just been mentioned there was a most
interesting period in which the two languages, or the two kinds of
languages, the ancient and the vernacular, were present in the minds
of most well-educated people in relations of almost exact balance
and equality, and there were no real differences whatever between the
uses of the one and the other. This period, which extended over
about two generations, one before the turn of the century, one after,
was the hinge on which the great change turned, a quiet revolution,
effected unconsciously in the main, it would seem, and participated

1 32

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

in by many who would have regretted it if they had known what
they were doing, but of vastly more importance than most of the
changes which have been the subject of literary controversy. This
period should be more carefully studied by literary historians with
reference to the history of the modern languages than it has yet been ;
and there are the two comments on it which are directly suggested by
the study of “Attic” prose.1

The first has to do with the effect of the equalization of the
languages upon the vernacular literatures, and is to the effect that
out of this passing state of equilibrium emerged a standard form of
literary prose in every modem language, upon which all later forms
are founded and out of which they have developed without radical
or revolutionary change.

Italian, English and French prose of the preceding periods has
various merits which antiquarians love to point out for the reproof
or exhortation of writers of the present day. But none of it is quite
standard prose. Some of it is too popular and crude and violent.
Some of it is too highly wrought and fantastically mannered. And
a third kind, — the smallest class, — though pure and correct, is too
poverty-stricken, thin, and limited in its expressive resources. The
explanation of this fact of course is that, as we have just observed,
men of ideas reserved all the serious, progressive, and modern uses
of their intellects for expression in Latin ; they felt that the spoken
languages had not been sufficiently conventionalized to carry the
definite meanings and logical processes of continued exposition. It
was good for concrete uses alone. And as long as this sort of
differentiation continued in force there could not be a standard prose-
style in either Latin or the various vernaculars, for a standard form

of prose is determined by the general thought of the age which it
expresses, its collective wisdom and experience ; it is neither remotely
and professionally intellectual, on the one hand, nor a simple record
of facts and sensations, on the other; its function is rather to relate
the varied phenomena of the external life of each period to its dom¬
inant ideas and the general philosophic trend of its mind. It is clear
that no such style could make its appearance in an age when the
intellect spoke one language, the senses another.

vuaRewL'LatTnln^hr'"1! co"cerninS the Nation of the vernacular lan-
~ his

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 133

On the other hand, when these two languages had become vir¬
tually interchangeable in the minds of a great many writers, as they
were, for example, in the minds of Montaigne and Bacon, when one
and the other came with equal ease and idiomatic freedom from their
pens, it made little difference in fact which one they used, for each
would have some of the characteristic quality of the other. A writer
in Latin would show the colloquial and concrete qualities of his speech
in his own language ; a writer in French or English would derive
from his Latin the rhetorical firmness, the exact use of abstraction,
the logical process which the learned language imposes.

This is the phenomenon that we observe in fact in the period of
Montaigne and Bacon. These are the first writers in the vernacular
languages who employ a style which renders the process of thought
and portrays the picturesque actuality of life with equal effect and
constantly relates the one to the other ; and it is in this sense that we
may justify the statement that the Anti-Ciceronian leaders — Mon¬
taigne, Charron, and Pasquier in France, Bacon, Hall, Jonson,
Wotton in England— are the actual founders of modem prose-style
in their respective languages. In the works of these authors, and in
none of those that precede them, we can find a style in the popular
language which is at once firm, uniform, and level enough to be called
a style and also adaptable enough to adjust itself to the changing
life of the modern world — a style which may grow and change in
later generations without losing its recognizable features.

The second comment to be made in this connection is that the
character of the Anti-Ciceronian movement in prose-style — whether
we consider its fundamental principles or the models it proposed for
imitation — was eminently favorable to the process of leveling and
approximation, the virtual blending, in fact, of Latin and vernacular
style that was going on during this period. Ciceronian purism had
tended to keep the two kinds of speech apart from one another. Not
that the Ciceronians had been unfavorable to the study of prose-style
in the vernacular. Bembo and Ascham, on the contrary, had studied
the subject carefully. But their purism in Latin style begot a corre¬
sponding temper in their treatment of the native languages, and they
mistakenly attempted to shut up Italian, French and English within
the inadequate limits of the literary vocabulary which they had ac¬
quired at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Misled by the lack
of a proper historical sense which was characteristic of their school,

134

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

they pretended that the vernacular tongues had already attained their
full maturity and were ready to be standardized in grammars, dic¬
tionaries, and rhetorics. The central idea of the Anti-Ciceronian
movement, on the other hand, was that style should be adapted to
the differences of men and times. The great modern principle of
unending change and development was implicit in its rhetorical
theory; and many of its leaders expressed their new-found joy in
freedom by indulging in strange caprices of vocabulary. English and
French are suddenly deformed by a riot of freakish Latinisms on the
one hand, and expanded at the same time by new and piquant dis¬
coveries in the expressiveness of colloquial speech. The Latin of
humanist and scholar of course loses its remoteness by the same
process, and begins to bristle with strange words picked up from
Plautus, or Greek, or medieval Latin, or the living languages.

To discuss the interesting results in the style of seventeenth-
century prose that followed this general prevalence of the hedge¬
breaking custom would require a separate essay, perhaps a volume.
We must proceed here merely to point out that there was a more
specific way in which Anti-Ciceronianism aided the process of level¬
ing and the transference of the qualities of Latin prose to the various
vernaculars, namely, through the character of its preferred Latin
models. The Ciceronian style cannot be reproduced in English, or
indeed in any modern language. The ligatures of its comprehensive
period are not found in the syntax of an uninflected tongue; and the
artifices necessary to supply their function must produce either fan¬
tastic distortion or insufferable bombast. This is true after all the
experiments of four centuries in quest of formal beauty. Certainly
in the sixteenth century no modern speech had developed an art of
prose adequate to the imitation of so difficult a model, and the best
that any of them could do was to reproduce the oratorical style of
medieval Latin, in which only the ornaments and the simpler elements
of the form of the Ciceronian pattern are employed for the purpose
of formal beauty. That these could indeed be transferred with some
success into vernacular forms of style had been proved in Spain and
England, and even in Italy and France; but it was evident that none
o t e varieties of estilo culto developed by this process was adequate
to serve as a vehicle for the advancing thought of the new age or to
portray the actualities of any real world. No oratorical prose, indeed
whether based on the pure Ciceronian, or on the derived medieval!

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 135

pattern, could serve for this purpose. As long as these were the
preferred models a normal form of French or English prose could
not appear.

But Seneca is easy. There is nothing in his syntax that could
prove a bar to the expression of the ideas of a keen-minded critic
of the end of the sixteenth century concerning the moral experience
of his times or himself ; on the contrary, the brevity of his construc¬
tions, the resolved and analytic character of his sentences, would
provide such a writer with a mold exactly adapted to the character
of his mind and the state of his language. Tacitus, of course, is
harder reading; but the kind of difficulty that he offers would prove
to be no more than a welcome stimulus and challenge to the trained
wits of rationalists like Lipsius, Bacon, Malvezzi, Gracian, and
Balzac. In brief, ancient Anti-Ciceronianism worked in a resolved
style, and the perfect success with which its manner was transferred
to French, Italian, Spanish, and English style during the early seven¬
teenth century is proof of its fitness to serve as the model on which
a standard modern prose could be formed.

Finally, it is to be observed that the equilibrium between the
languages determines the sources from which the student of the
Anti-Ciceronian movement must draw his knowledge of contem¬
porary opinion. He must learn to disregard linguistic boundary¬
lines. He must use the Latin discussions of contemporary and
ancient Latin style, discussions in Latin of contemporary vernacular
style — and these are frequent until the middle of the seventeenth
century — and of course, more and more as time goes on, discussions
of vernacular tendencies in the vernacular; and he must learn that
all of these are of equal value. It has already been seen that the
beginnings of the movement were in humanistic Latin prose, in the
works of Erasmus, Muret, Lipsius ; and naturally the theory and
criticism of it are found in the same place. But it is somewhat
surprising to discover that a whole generation after the balances
have tipped in favor of the literary use of the vernacular criticism
of vernacular tendencies in prose-style continues to appear in Latin.
Descartes, for instance, writes to Balzac in Latin an illuminating
letter concerning the French style of the time, and Bacon was cer¬
tainly thinking of English, French, and Italian style in the paragraph
concerning recent prose which he added to his Latin translation of
the Advancement of Learning in 1622. The student must learn, in

1 36 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

short, that as far as style is concerned there was no difference in
the mind of this period between Latin prose, on the one hand, and
English, French, Italian, or Spanish, on the other : Lipsius writes to
Montaigne of his style, after reading his first volume of Essais, in
similar terms to those he had used in writing at an earlier date to
Muret of his new manner of writing.1

Nor are these facts valuable only as indicating a method of study.
They are of first-rate importance in the history of the movement
itself as showing that in the minds of most of its leaders it was in
the classical and not in the popular tradition. On this point there
can be no question. Even when the custom of writing prose in the
native languages had become very common, as it did during the
decades 1590-1610, most of those who fell in with the new tendency
felt that they were following in the train of Politian, Erasmus, and
Muret, and ultimately of Seneca and Tacitus. They thought of their
vernacular style as having come over to them from the Latin of the
humanists or as directly derived from the Latin style of antiquity;
and they seem usually to have been unaware of any relation, either
of opposition or evolution, with the vernacular prose of the pre¬
ceding age.

The only very important exception to this general rule is to be
found in the critical utterances of Montaigne and of certain writers,
like Pasquier, for instance, who were directly influenced by him.
Montaigne was well read in the vernacular literature of the sixteenth
century and even of an earlier period ; and he was too humane a
critic of life to pass by the true mirrors of his age without studying
his own features in them too, even though his grand enthusiasms are
all for certain of the ancients. Iiis criticisms, it is true, are too few
and inexplicit to be satisfying; but they tend to show that he re¬
garded the ornate prose and poetry of the past age with something
of the same contempt that he felt for Bembo and other Ciceronian-
izing Latinists. We wish that he had been more definite in telling
us why he scorned Guevara’s famous Golden Book;2 but we may
be reasonably certain that the poverty of their content and the rich-

1 Lipsius to Montaigne, 1389, Epp. Misc. Cent. I (first published in 1590).
See also the correspondence between Mile, de Gournay and Lipsius of the
same year, in which the lady writes in French, the savant in Latin; yet the
style is of the same mould. Concerning this correspondence see Bonnefon,
Montaigne et ses Amis, Tl, 334-352.

* I, 48 ( Des Destries).

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 137

ness of their stylistic ornament were equal causes of his distaste.
We should like to be certain too that he is thinking of the Spanish
prosaists and the style of Guevara and Mexia when he speaks of
‘Taffectation et la recherche des fantastiques elevations espagnoles
et petrarchistes” ; 1 for the association of Petrarchanism in verse and
the estilo culto of Guevara and Lyly in prose as two similar mani¬
festations of the medieval love of rhetoric would be exactly what we
should expect in an Anti-Ciceronian and rationalist like Montaigne.
But the passage as a whole does not permit us to say with certainty
that he was thinking of Spanish prose, and we must be content to
know that he did actually dislike both these kinds of vernacular
writing. The franche naviete of Froissart was, on the other hand,
wholly to his taste, and if he seems not to understand the real im¬
portance of Rabelais he at least enjoyed him.2

Bacon

(a)

Bacon and Tacitus

There is only one other author of nearly equal importance with
Lipsius and Montaigne in the history of the establishment of the
Attic tradition — Francis Bacon. He was not quite the first professed
Anti-Ciceronian in England. Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey
undertook a vigorous attack during the nineties against both Cicero¬
nian Latin and the ornate vernacular style of Lyly and his school,
each of them seeking an escape from formalism through the method
of extravagance and licentious freedom of style; and there are in¬
teresting similarities between their efforts and those of some Conti¬
nental “libertines” of the same period. But neither of these writers
had philosophy or authority enough to lead his age, and their attack
on tradition was soon lost sight of in the great success of Bacon’s
more imposing offensive movement.

As a historian, Bacon offers useful aid to the student of prose-
style. In a passage in the Advancement of Learning (most of which
was probably written some years before its publication in 1605), he
1 II, 10 (Des Livres) .

2 See Villey, Les Sources et Involution, I, 204.

1 38 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

has sketched the history of the Ciceronian cult and described the
causes that produced it. He is perhaps following a faulty sketch in
one of Muret’s orations (delivered at Rome in 1575, in introducing a
course in Juvenal) : but his account is so much more complete and
correct that it may be considered the first attempt to place the Renais¬
sance in historical perspective. — Should we add that his success is
a sign that the Renaissance has already passed or is passing? Per¬
haps so — Ciceronianism is his illustration of that distemper of learn¬
ing “when words are valued more than matter” ; its origin, he finds,
was in the excessive zeal of the scholars of the sixteenth century for
an exact knowledge of the words of antiquity, and he attributes this
in turn — acutely enough but not altogether correctly — to the contro¬
versial needs created by the Reformation, and the search for author¬
ity among the Fathers of the Church. He quotes a joke from
Erasmus’ Ciceronianus, names as leading Ciceronians since Erasmus’
time Ascham and Car, the Protestant German humanist Sturm, and
the “Portugal bishop Osorius” (the latest exemplar of the pure cult),
describes their style with his usual analytic skill, and closes with the
striking statement, which perhaps is due to hints in Erasmus’ dia¬
logue, that if he should have to choose between the “weight” of the
scholastic philosophers and the “copie” of the rhetorical humanists
he would take the former.

The words of this passage are probably familiar to most literary
scholars ; but this is not true of the supplement to it which Bacon
added when his work was translated into Latin and published as
De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1622. The new passage provides a
fairly exact measure of the amount of water that has run under
the bridge in three or four decades of literary history, and has an
additional interest as an illustration of a new kind of curiosity, in
the men of this generation, which enables them to turn upon them¬
selves and recognize their own changes of taste and temper. Their
perception of historical perspectives has made them more observant
of change and progress in their own world ; a new intelligence is
emerging from the methods of skeptical inquiry taught by Petrarch,
Erasmus, and Montaigne. In translation, Bacon’s words are as
follows :

Somewhat sounder is another form of style, — yet neither is it innocent
of some vain shows, which is likely to follow in time upon this copious and
luxuriant oratorical manner. It consists wholly in this: that the words be

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 139

sharp and pointed ; sentences concised ; a style in short that may be called
‘turned’ rather than fused. Whence it happens that everything dealt with
by this kind of art seems rather ingenious than lofty. Such a style is found
in Seneca very freely used , in Tacitus and the younger Pliny more moderately;
and it is beginning to suit the ears of our age as never before. And indeed
it is pleasant to subtle and low-ranging minds (for by means of it they con¬
ciliate the honor due to letters) ; however better-trained judgments disapprove
it; and it may be looked upon as a distemper of learning, in as far as it is
accompanied by a taste for mere words and their concinnity.”

This passage tells admirably what the Anti-Ciceronian movement
is, and how it arose. It describes the form of the new style, and
provides a motive for its rapid diffusion at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Not only this, however; it also establishes the
parallel between this contemporary Anti-Ciceronianism and that of
the first century, both in the character of its style and in its relation
to the oratorical prose of the preceding century. The only point we
miss is that Bacon does not clearly say that the new tendency is due
to actual imitation of the ancients; and this defect is easily accounted
for by Bacon’s unwillingness to admit the effective survival of the
principle of imitation and authority either in himself or his age ; it
is of a piece with the unfortunate, and sometimes mean, reticence he
displays concerning his own great obligations to intellectual masters
of the ancient and modern worlds.

And in fact, notwithstanding the apparent cool detachment of his
criticism, Bacon knows very well that he is here describing his own
style. He has left sufficient evidence in his own utterances of the
truth of his secretary’s statement that Tacitus, Caesar, and Seneca
were his favorite authors, and that the order of his preference was
that in which these three names are here mentioned. Nor have the
critics required the aid of such statements; the resemblance of
Bacon’s style to that of his masters has often been observed by them.
The praise he bestows on Seneca’s style, says one of them, ad ip sum
Verulammm hand immerito detorqueri possit. He was attracted to
Seneca and Tacitus, this writer continues, by kinship of talent; and
it was in the assiduous reading of these authors that he cultivated his
taste for a style of acute and condensed brevity, ornamented, at the
same time, with the riches of rhetoric and an almost poetic splendor
of words.1

1 See P. Jacquinet, Francisci Baconi de re litteraria judicia, Paris, 1863, pp.
98 ff.

140

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

How are we to account then for the derogatory, or at least
balancing, tone of the passage we have just quoted? Properly in¬
terpreted, it may serve as an aid to a more exact description of
Bacon’s tastes and the character of his literary influence than has yet
been attempted, or to a correction of some misconceptions concerning
them. It has been the custom to place Seneca first among Bacon’s
models and favorites, but this is an error. When his words are care¬
fully examined, it is apparent that what he says in discommendation
of the style “freely used” by Seneca is all directed toward “vain
shows” and verbal ornament, the same fault of undue love of con-
cinnity, in short, which was a cause of the revolt against Cicero’s
form of rhetoric. This is somewhat puzzling, especially in view of
the fact that Seneca himself had made current among Anti-Cicero-
nian critics the phrases they habitually used to express their contempt
for the sensuous beauty of the balanced Ciceronian phrase : non
ornamentum znrile concinnitas, and so forth. But the reader of
Seneca can reconcile the contradiction. For that very literary and
rhetorical essayist customarily framed his antitheses and argutice in
a balanced form, different indeed from that of the copious oratorical
style, but yet capable of becoming almost as transparently artificial.
At its best an excellent literary form for the insinuation of subtle
shades of thought and fine distinctions, at its worst it is indeed no
more than “mere words and their concinnity.” And it must be
added that Bacon has in mind the imitators of Seneca more than
Seneca himself: almost certainly Lipsius’ Latinity; probably the
English style of Bishop Hall’s Epistles and other moral writings;
perhaps also the Senecan manner of a number of English essayists
who had written since his own first volume of 1597. All these writers
had shown how easily the imitation of Seneca could descend to verbal
ingenuity or mere pun on occasions when the idea was not worthy
of the artifice bestowed upon it.

The faults of Tacitus and his imitators were clear enough to
seventeenth-century critics; but they did not run in this direction.
Obscurity, enigma, contortion are not qualities of style that comport
with concinnity and the study of the abstract charm of words. Evi¬
dently Bacon is drawing a vertical line of distinction down through
the area of Anti-Ciceronianism in addition to the other transverse
line that divides it as a whole from the Ciceronian types of prose ;
and when this is observed and confirmed by a reference to the

ATTIC BROSE : LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 141

qualities of his own style, his literary comments and judgments
throughout his works become more consistent. It becomes clear that
he has not expressed anywhere a positive approval of Seneca’s
subject-matter or style, though he refers to his letters as a model for
the new essay-form and cites his father as skilful in antitheses.
But on the contrary he has directly praised Tacitus in a private letter
to Sir Fulke Greville, as “the first of historians,’’ and again, in the
Temporis Partus Masculus, with the characteristic emphasis of his
laconic style : “Many like the moral doctrines of Aristotle and Plato;
but of Tacitus it may be said that he utters the very morals of life
itself.” 1 The former of these passages is worthy of a careful
consideration.2 He says that history is of most use for those who
wish to know only humanity, and continues: “For poets, I can com¬
mend none, being resolved to be ever a stranger to them. Of orators,
if I must choose any, it shall be Demosthenes, both for the argument
he handles, and for that his eloquence is more proper for a statesman
than Cicero’s. Of all stories, I think Tacitus simply the best; Livy
very good ; Thucydides above any of the writers of Greek matters.”
In every respect this is a characteristic Anti-Ciceronian utterance :
in its rejection of poetry from useful studies, in its preference of
Tacitus to Livy (along with which goes a liking for Thucydides),
and in its contemptuous treatment of oratory, partly veiled by the
exaltation of Demosthenes above Cicero. Finally, it is to be noted
that the extraordinary enthusiasm of the writer for history — which
virtually means politics when connected with the influence of Tacitus
— associates him with a particular phase of the Anti-Ciceronian com¬
plex which had already declared itself in the programs of Muret and
Lipsius. It is true that at about the same time that Bacon was
writing these words he must also have been writing the passage in
an early section of the Advancement of Learning in which he speaks
without qualification of Cicero as the first, or second, of orators,
Livy as the first of historians, Virgil and Varro as first in their kinds
of all those known to men. But the apparent conflict only gives us
the opportunity to note a fact that every student of one subject must

I Aristotelis et Platoms moralia pleriquc admirant ; scd Tacitus magis znvas
morum observationes spirat. Spedding ed. (1870), III, 538.

I I accept Spedding's suggested attribution of this letter to the hand of
Bacon, though it was sent in the name of Essex. It seems to me impossible
that Essex should have been so familiar with the new trend of thought and
studies in the nineties as the writer shows himself to be.

142 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

take account of : that the Anti-Ciceronian critics, even the boldest of
them, always keep an Augustan and Ciceronian orthodoxy in reserve ,
and even Montaigne will admit that if an abstract literary excellence,
independent of the practical and moral uses of the works in which
it is displayed, be the basis of one’s judgment, the Augustan age and
the ages that resemble it are on a higher plane than any others. It
is sometimes necessary to surprise them in the more confidential tone
of letters and casual notes in order to discover the full range of their
heterodoxy.

In Bacon’s case, the frequency of his quotation from Tacitus may
be accepted as evidence of his preference of that author to all others ;
for an acquaintance with Tacitus was not in that age to be taken for
granted; nor was the citation of his difficult phrases a literary con¬
vention, as was that of the Senecan “sentences.” On the contrary,
it was the mark of an individual taste or a peculiar initiation.
Bacon’s influence, like his own prose-style, can best be explained in
terms of his admiration and imitation of Tacitus; and the point has
had to be elaborated at some length for the reason that it has a special
bearing upon the development of seventeenth -century English style.
The other models of Anti-Ciceronian prose were already known to
Englishmen : Hall and the letter-writers were familiarizing them with
the Senecan manner of Lipsius, and the intimate whimsical vein of
Montaigne was beginning to be domesticated in their own prose.
From these sources they could learn most of what Anti-Ciceronianism
had to teach concerning the expression of acute wit by ingenious
rhetoric. But the desire for wit and ingenuity was only one phase
of seventeenth-century taste. Combined with it was a desire for
ceremonious dignity, an ideal of deliberate and grave demeanor,
which was partly, no doubt, an inheritance from the courtly past,
but was modified and indeed largely created by the profound moral
experience which the new age was undergoing. A prose-style that
should adequately express this age must contrive, therefore, to mingle
elements that in any other period would appear oddly contrasted.
It must be at once ingenious and lofty, intense yet also profound,
acute, realistic, revealing, but at the same time somewhat grave and
mysterious. It must have in short that curious sublimity which is
felt in the painting of El Greco, in the sermons and letters of Donne,
and in certain sculptures of Bernini.

Seneca its favorite author — might suggest the ideal manner ;

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 143

but he was too superficial, too familiar, to furnish a complete model
of it. Lucan’s nodosity and rhetorical pomp served better as a guide
to the poets ; and Tacitus, if he had not been too difficult (and indeed
too novel, for he had not been widely read in the sixteenth century)
would have been the usual exemplar of English prose-style. Bacon’s
great service to English prose was that he naturalized a style in which
ingenious obscurity and acute significance are the appropriate garb
of the mysteries of empire; and by means of his example the Taci-
tean strain became familiar to many English writers who were not
sufficiently trained in Tacitus himself to imitate his style directly.1

(*)

Science and Seventeenth Century Prose

Besides domesticating the style of Tacitus in English prose, Bacon
aided in various technical ways which cannot be described here in
the formulation of a new rhetorical program.2 But of course his
greatest service to the prose movement of his time was not directly
and expressly a literary one. It is to be found in his contributions
to the great intellectual movement of which Anti-Ciceronianism is but
the rhetorical and literary expression.

The progress of rationalism during the sixteenth century' had been
rapid, and it had been increasingly so as the century drew to an end.
But the complete triumph which it was to obtain was still adjourned
by a partial lack of cooperation among its leaders in the various
fields of intellectual endeavor. Many of them were specialists, of
course, who failed to understand as clearly as the defenders of
orthodoxy in the universities and courts did how closely their various
subjects were related to one another in the general interests of
progress. Cujas and Alciati, for instance, were jurists ; Ramus’
studies ranged widely, but he impressed himself on his age as a
logician ; Montaigne was a moralist pure and simple ; and though

’On the “sublimity” cf Tacitus, see an interesting passage in La Mothe
le Vayer, Jugemens sur Historiens, Works (1685), III, 208: “Son genre
d’ecrire grave (etc.).”

1 To avoid repetition I have omitted several points concerning Bacon’s
rhetorical theory which are more or less developed in the essay on “Muret
and Attic Prose” mentioned above. Most important of these perhaps is
Bacon’s constant dependence upon Aristotle’s Rhetoric — often a peculiar sign
of Anti-Ciceronian intention. There is need of a thorough and complete study
of Bacon’s rhetorical teachings.

144

SCHELLIN'G ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Muret and Lipsius were both fully aware of the revolutionary impli¬
cations in their methods of study, they were daunted by the formid¬
able front of orthodoxy. Intellectually free, they were involved in
practical relations with the powers of conservatism which compelled
them to protect themselves by disingenuous compromises and a shock¬
ing Machiavellianism. Of course their hesitations and concealments
were only the usual marks of all movements of radicalism and inno¬
vation ; a forward tendency never presents as solid a front as the
established system that it is bound to conflict with, because its aims
are partly concealed in the future, and no one can tell how the various
elements that cooperate in it will relate and adjust themselves in the
final settlement. But reformers had more than the usual reasons
for fear and vacillation in the sixteenth century because the ortho¬
doxies of all kinds, religious, political, intellectual, and literary, were
more than usually aware at that time of the community of their
interests and more effectively united in self-defense. What was
needed at the end of the century was such an appraisement of the
situation as would give an equal consciousness of their common aims,
an equal clearness of purpose, to the champions of the more pro¬
gressive and positive modes of thought.

This was the most important part of the task undertaken by
Bacon in the Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum.
It is now generally recognized that the materials of which these works
were made were most of them old and familiar; many of them had
even been worked up by his predecessors into almost the form in
which Bacon used them. Aristotelianism, medieval scholasticism,
Barthollism, Platonism, Ciceronianism, Euphuism, and whatever
other shadowy phantoms of reality had haunted the Renaissance, had
already been severally exposed to the criticism of reason. But Bacon
gathered them all together within the limits of a single survey, and
covered them all over with one narrow hie facet. After that they
were as pallid and ridiculous as ghosts astray in the open daylight,
they could no longer frighten any one.

But that was not all that he did for the new rationalism. He put
the vigorous new natural sciences of his age at the center of all his
projects for the progress of knowledge. The program of education
announced by Muret and elaborated by Lipsius included only the two
branches of moral philosophy (the sapientia, or private morality of
the ancient Stoics and Peripatetics, and the prudentia, or worldly

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 145

wisdom, which they studied in Tacitus, Machiavelli, and other ancient
and modern politicians), with the rhetoric appropriate to them. The
effect of Bacon’s writings was to put natural science in a definite
place in this program, — not the first place, it is true, because the
century that began with Montaigne and ended with La Bruyere and
Halifax was above all else the century of moral philosophy, — but
yet in a recognized position of authority, from which it could exer¬
cise a constant influence upon the moral researches of the age by
clarifying, illustrating, defining their method of procedure. This
modification had such important literary effects that it must not be
passed over here with a mere mention.

The method introduced by Lipsius and Montaigne in the study
of the moral situation of their time was in fact the method of
science. It does not appear that these philosophers thought of it in
that way, or were in any profound way affected by the scientific
studies that preceded Bacon’s work : their intellectual houses were
without windows, or had very narrow ones. But they were com¬
pelled by the impulse of their positivistic purposes to adopt the same
method of experiment and induction in their own subjects that has
since produced such astounding results in natural science. These
philosophers were in revolt, not only against the medieval forms of
thought, as they are often said to have been, but also against the aims
of the Renaissance itself as they had chiefly displayed themselves
hitherto. For the effort of their own century had been devoted,
exactly like that of the more remote past, chiefly to the rearing of
conspicuous philosophic constructions which had no foundations in
immediate observation or experience. “Men have despised,” said
Bacon, “to be conservant in ordinary and common matters. . . . ;
but contrariwise they have compounded sciences chiefly of a certain
resplendent or lustrous matter, chosen either to give glory to the
subtlety of disputations or to the eloquence of discourses.” 1 They
themselves took the humbler task of searching these glorious Houses
of Pride to their sandy foundations. Nor did they pretend to raise
other constructions in their stead, except only such modest shelters
as would serve their immediate moral needs. To be conversant in
ordinary and common matters was their only boast. To distinguish
the facts of moral experience with critical and inquiring eyes, to
record their observations with the acuteness and exactness of the new

* A dv. of Learning, II ( Works , Spedding ed., 1870, III, 418).

146 schelling anniversary papers

literary style they had devised for this purpose, this was an intel¬
lectual exercise well adapted to their subtle wits ; and it was a task
moreover that afforded them the thrill of novel ad\enture. In short,
the intellectual program of the seventeenth century was the scientific
work of moral observation and delineation ; and Montaigne s avowal
of his purpose to portray for the first time exactly what the thing
is that goes by the name of a man is echoed at the other end of the
century with only a slight difference of tone, in La Bruyere’s truly
scientific program, “the description of man.”

Bacon therefore did not have to teach the method of science to
the moralists of his age ; for they had already learned it. But the
new studies in natural history which Bacon helped to make popular
were of great aid to them in their own work, because it trained
them, and of course their audiences too, in the habit of exact ob¬
servation, sharp definition, and clear classification which were neces¬
sary for their purpose. Bacon himself provides an excellent illus¬
tration of scientific method in the realm of moral observation; for
the aphorisms, Antitheta, “topics,” “colours of good and evil,” etc.,
from which, as from a spinner’s bottom, he says, he unwound the
thread of his essays, are pieces of scientific apparatus used in a
moralist’s workshop. They are the notes he has taken at the moment
when the experiment was on and observation was keenest and then
allocated, by a rough-and-ready scheme of classification, among cer¬
tain headings and sub-headings which will make them available for
future reference. To enumerate the works of seventeenth-century
morality that were composed by this method would be tedious:
Descartes’ Meditations, Wotton’s Aphorisms of Education, and
countless other works display the method even in their form; and
it is but slightly veiled by a more elaborate manner in Browne’s
Religio Medici; Pascal, La Bruyere, Temple, and Halifax all em¬
ployed it.

To distinguish rhetorical from intellectual process in the writings
of professed naturalists is to divide between the bark and the tree:
whatever the motions of their minds, they will betray themselves in
their stjle. But some of the results of the addition of science to
the intellectual program may be traced most clearly in the history
of prose-style. They are chiefly of two opposite kinds, which finally
came into open conflict in the second half of the century. At first
the natural sciences tended to give greater imaginative range and

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 147

freedom to the new Attic prose. We may observe this phenomenon
most clearly in the writings of certain professed men of science who
became literary men and stylists through an interesting blending
in their thought of the ideas of Bacon and Montaigne, students of
medicine especially, like Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton
or the Parsian doctor Gui Patin, who bring into new and curious
relations the results of their physical explorations of man’s nature
and the moral speculations of their time. Essentially moralists, as
all men of their age were, they were able to add to the common
stock of ideas and images a wealth of curious detail derived from
their professional pursuits and their knowledge of unfamiliar facts.
The courageous skepticism of the new kind of morality and the
rhetorical audacity that accompanied it appealed equally to their
tastes ; and they contributed in their turn out of their mastery of
physiological research to the effects of curiosity and novelty on
which so much of the success of the new prose depended. In two
writers in whom we may fairly describe the union of scientific and
moral interest as perfect and equal— in Sir Thomas Browne and
Pascal, — we may observe at their highest development the powers
of intellectual imagination which might be born of this union.

As the century advanced, however, it became apparent that
science was not to remain on the side of poetry and the imagination ;
on the contrary, it allied itself more and more closely with the
movement for clarity and common sense which was gathering
strength from so many different sources. A well-known pronuncia-
mento of the Royal Society in England expressly dissociated the
literary aims of that scientific body from the rhetoric of Bacon and
aligned them with the new taste for a plain and clear style. At
the same time, in France, the influence of Descartes was gradually
making itself felt even among those who were not at all willing to
accept his philosophy : imagination began to be a word of derision ;
Malebranche taught an almost geometrical use of reason as a cor¬
rective of its evil influence; the teachers of Port Royal found in
logic the way to a Christian plainness and purity of style ; and the
quality that distinguishes the style of La Bruyere, and even the
nobler language of Pascal, is a strictly scientific precision rather
than those occasional, and as it were accidental, triumphs of revela¬
tion which are effected by an ambitious imagination or a roving
fancy.

1 48

SCHELL ING ANNIVERSARY TAPERS

Conclusion

Muret, Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon, though the period of their
collective activity covers three-quarters of a century, belong to a
single generation in the development of Renaissance culture, the
generation in which modern rationalism definitely declared itself as
the doctrine of the future, and the new, the Anti-Ciceronian, form
of prose-style assumed its place in the world of letters. But Muret
belongs at the beginning of this generation; he is partly the pioneer,
partly the founder of its intellectual program. The three phi¬
losophers we have considered in the preceding pages lived in the
full flower of its career, when its conflict with the forces of the
past was virtually over. Rationalism had now won its victory, and
displayed that tendency to divide into various schools or phases which
always appears when a general idea mingles with the several ele¬
ments of a varied intellectual life and takes different color from
each of them.

In this phase of its history Attic prose divides into the three
main forms, or perhaps we should call them merely tendencies to¬
ward distinct forms, which displayed themselves more conspicuously
in the generation that followed, and can even be distinguished,
though less clearly, in the “classical” prose which developed in a
succeeding generation out of seventeenth-century Attic. Lipsius,
Montaigne, and Bacon each represents one of these three forms or
tendencies, and the discussion of their ideas has perhaps made clear
what they are. A specific statement will serve, however, to make
more definite what has already been said of them.

I. First in order of importance is a tendency due to the prev¬
alence of Stoic philosophy. The prose in which this tendency is
manifest can best be known as prose of the Stoic model. ‘Senecan
prose’ would be more definite ; but it would sometimes include too
much, and on the other hand it would fail to indicate the full scope
of Stoic imitation. Lipsius is as clearly the founder of this style
as he is of the Neo-Stoic philosophy which usually accompanied it
in the first half of the century.

II. To the student of events beyond the limits of the seventeenth
century, a tendency in style associated with the skeptical or “liber-

ATTIC PROSE: LIPSIUS, MONTAIGNE, BACON 149

tine” thought of that century and especially with the influence of
Montaigne, would seem worthy of the first place in order of import¬
ance. This we can only call “libertine” prose, whether we consider
its philosophical implications or its rhetorical theories and form.
The groundwork of this style is the Senecan pattern, which is so
much more apparent in the Stoic model ; but it aims at freedom, and
chooses several other writers, ancient and modern, as the models by
which it seeks, through the method of imitation, to escape from the
method of imitation. Rabelais is the chief of these. Montaigne adds
the taste for Plutarch’s essays ; and the form of Montaigne’s own
style, from 1600 onward, mingles with that of Rabelais’ in almost
equal proportions in the prevailing forms of libertine style in the
seventeenth century.

III. Next to these in the favor of the age was the prose of
“politicians” and students of “prudential wisdom” : Bacon, Malvezzi,
Gracian, Grotius, and a host of others, who get their rhetorical and
often their political ideas chiefly from Tacitus.

To these three major forms must be added a tendency which can¬
not be separated from any of them, but manifests itself everywhere
as the peculiar mark of the genius of the seventeenth century, a ten¬
dency observable in writers as normal as Bacon, Browne, and Balzac,
but apparent in its full efflorescence in the letters of Donne, the es¬
says of Gracian and Malvezzi and many of their fellow countrymen,
the histories of Pierre Mathieu, and many similar works. For this
tendency there is unfortunately no convenient name in English.
“Metaphysical” is even a less happy term to describe the kinds of
prose in which it appears than the related kinds of poetry ; and there
seems to be no possibility of making a practicable adjective or noun
in English from the continental terms concettismo, etc. It may be
known as the “prose of imaginative conceit” in order that we may
keep in line with the terms of current criticism. But I am tempted
to make the bold innovation of calling it “the baroque style” in
prose; for no other term will so exactly describe its characteristic
qualities.

In the three forms enumerated above (with due regard to the
concettistic tendency in each of them) may be ranged all the Attic
prose of the century from 1575 to 1675, and that is to say all its
characteristic prose, except the writings of one or two great indi¬
vidualists who escape the influence of their time ; and it is upon the

I s<;

SCHELLIXG ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

lines laid down in this classification that the further study of seven¬
teenth-century prose-style must be conducted. What is now neces¬
sary is a thorough survey of Stoic prose, libertine prose, and
Tacitean prose separately, each treated with reference to its philo¬
sophical theory, its preferred models in antiquity and modern times,
its relation to the culture of the age, and its rhetorical forms.
Only the outlines of such a survey can be suggested, of course, in
the study of individual authors, — even of such representative and
influential leaders as Muret, Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA, DRAMATIC
TENSION, AND TYPES OF DRAMATIC
“CONFLICT”

Allison Gaw

Frofessor of English, University of Southern California

IN his essay on La Loi du Theatre Ferdinand de Brunetiere in
the year 1894 attempted to state what he considered to be “the
theory, or, io speak more modestly, a theory of dramatic action.”
“Will any argument, however ingenious,” he asked, “alter the fact
that all poetry is either lyric, epic, or dramatic ? Certainly not.
And if the Cid, if Phcdre, if Tartuffe , if the Legatairc universel,
if the Barbier dc Seville, if the Camaraderie, if the Demi-monde, if
C'elimare le bien-aime, are dramatic, does it not follow that all those
works, so different, must nevertheless have not merely a few points
of contact or vague resemblance, but an essential characteristic in
common ? What is this characteristic ?” 1

This appears to have been the first time that the question of
the one positive trait fundamental to drama throughout all of its
various types was ever definitely and seriously discussed in formal
literary criticism. Concerning the tragic type of drama Aristotle 2
had laid down the celebrated dicta that it was necessarily “an imi¬
tation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magni¬
tude; ... in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and
fear effecting the proper purgation of those emotions ;” that “The
plot is the first principal, and as it were, the soul of a tragedy” ;
that this plot should be unified, being composed of essential and non-
transposable parts ; and that the time of its duration should be such
“that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability,

1 Trans, of P. M. Hayden in B. H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama,
P- 405-

2 Poetics, trans. of S. H. Butcher, pp. 23, 27-29, 31, 33.

151

152

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good
fortune to bad.”

Gustav Freytag, in his Technik des Dramas (1863), had made
an important advance upon this theory. “Not the presentation of
a passion for itself,” he says, “but of a passion which leads to
action, is the business of dramatic art ; not the presentation of an
event for itself, but for its effect upon a human soul, is the dram¬
atist’s mission. . . . What the drama presents is always a struggle,
which, with strong perturbations of soul, the hero wages against
opposing forces. And as the hero must be endowed with a strong
life, with a certain one-sidedness, and be in embarrassment, the op¬
posing power must be made visible in a human representative.” 1
Elowever, although at this point employing such phraseology as
apparently to apply to the entire range of drama. Freytag re¬
peatedly in his discussions limited his statements to “serious drama,”
and used no illustrations drawn from the realm of comedy.

Thirty years later, Brunetiere, as has been above indicated,
definitely opened the broader question. What one characteristic is
basic to all forms of dramatic, as distinguished from epic and lyric,
art? To this, three different answers have at various times been
given.

Brunetiere himself broadened and deepened the theory of Frey¬
tag. He examined a number of diverse examples from French
drama and came to the conclusion that “In drama or farce, what
we ask of the theater is the spectacle of a 7mll striving toward a
goal, and conscious of the means which it employs.” 2 Further, he
distinguished the various dramatic species on the basis of the seri¬
ousness of the obstacle against which the will was struggling. An
insurmountable obstacle, such as the decrees of Fate, Providence, or
of natural law, or frenzied passion, produced tragedy. An obstacle
surmountable only with difficulty, such as prejudice or social con¬
vention, gave romantic drama or social drama. Two equal opposing
wills produced comedy. Such obstacles as the irony of fortune, the
ridiculous aspect ot prejudice, or the disproportion between the
means and the end, gave farce.

Mr. William Archer, in his volume on Play-Making (1012)
took issue with the Freytag-Brunetiere theory. In Sophocles1

MacEwan> The Technique of the Drama, pp. 104-5.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

153

Agamemnon , he pointed out, there is no conflict, for Agamemnon
is merely a helpless victim of Clytemnestra’s prearranged plot.1
Sophocles’ CEdipus, too, merely writhes like a worm on a hook.
Neither does Othello make any fight against Iago. In As You Like
It the charm of the play does not spring from the struggle between
the banished Duke and the usurper or the struggle between Orlando
and Oliver, and there is not even the conflict between the eager lover
and a more or less reluctant maid. In no valid sense can it be said
that Ibsen’s Ghosts shows us will struggling against obstacles. Thus
Archer — and he concludes that “it is clearly an error to make con¬
flict indispensable to drama, and especially to insist — as do some of
Brunetiere’s followers — that the conflict must be between will and
will.”

Mr. Archer went on to develop a theory that the essential ele¬
ment in drama is not conflict, but crisis. “A play is a more or less
rapidly developing crisis in destiny or circumstances, and a dramatic
scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly furthering the ultimate event.
The drama may be called the art of crises, as fiction is the art of
gradual developments.” 2 This Mr. Archer declared to be “an in¬
duction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and
a deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
presentation.” And, admitting that not all crises are dramatic, he
attempted to distinguish a dramatic from an undramatic crisis “by
the fact that it develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through
a series of minor crises, involving more or less emotional excitement,
and, if possible, the vivid manifestation of character.” 3

In Studies in Stagecraft (1914) Mr. Clayton Hamilton, who had
previously 1 been a follower of Brunetiere, replied to Mr. Archer’s
contention, “I do not think it would be difficult to convince so open-
minded a critic as Mr. Archer that the element of ‘crisis’ is no

'Miss Elizabeth Woodbridge, in The Drama — Its Law and Its Technique
(1898), had already shown (pp. 137-61) that in at least one type of comedy,
illustrated by Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the case of
aggressor meeting aggressor is replaced by that of the overthrow of a victim
who has no opportunity to resist, but is merely deceived by the wiles of an
intriguer.

2 Play-Making, p. 36.

3 Ibid., p. 38. In a paper later reprinted in his volume on The Technique
of Play-Writing (see pp. 26-27), Mr. Charlton Andrews immediately and ably
defended Brunetiere’s theory against Mr. Archer, pointing out the elements
of conflict that underlay the various plays above referred to in this connection.

* The Theory of the Theatre, p. 29.

154

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

more indispensable to a genuinely interesting drama than the ele¬
ment of ‘conflict’;” he inquired where was the crisis in The Madras
House, The Pigeon, and The Great Adventure; and he proceeded
to discuss the work of Galsworthy, Granville Barker, Masefield,
Bennett, Miss Elizabeth Baker, and others in revolt against the
tradition of the “well-made play,” who emphasize character, tend
toward plotlessness, “refuse to restrict the drama to an exhibition
cf a struggle between human wills, and often choose instead to ex¬
hibit a deadlock between human wills that results in the negation of
action.” 1

Finally, in his volume on Problems of the Playwright (1917),
Mr. Hamilton offered a third theory as to the one essential of drama.
“Is there a single narrative element,” he asked,2 “without which
a dramatic scene cannot succeed ? I think that there is ; but I am
willing to revoke this decision as soon as any writer shall show me
an exception to the rule. It seems to me at present that the one
indispensable element to success upon the stage is the element of
contrast, and that a play becomes more and more dramatic in pro¬
portion to the multiplicity of contrasts that it contains within itself.
Such a play as Every Man in His Humour stands outside the
formula of Brunetiere, because it exhibits no struggle of contend¬
ing wills ; it also stands outside the formula of Mr. Archer, because
it exhibits neither a crisis nor a series of crises ; but it is a great
comedy, because it exhibits an unintermitted series of contrasts
between mutually foiling personalities.” 3

Here, then, in answer to the question, What is the logical dif¬
ferentia common to all drama? we have three different answers:
(1) will in conflict against obstacles; (2) crisis; (3) character-
contrast. Before attempting a fourth answer, let us frankly admit
that we are confronted by two dangers. The first is that of arguing
in a circle in support of a narrow definition. W^e may, for historical
reasons, accept a predetermined group of stage performances to
which we give the name dramas, and frame a definition to fit this
group, we may use this definition to exclude from the group other
stage performances which, if our original group had been larger,
and had permitted a more liberal definition, would have been ac-

1 Studies in Stagecraft, pp. 96-103.

Wage 5.

ments ^ ^ th'S P°int t0 inquire into the validity of these state-

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

155

cepted as plays; and we may then support our narrow definition of
drama by our refusal, a refusal that arose from the narrowness of
the definition itself. On the other hand we may enlarge our
definition until the word becomes useless for purposes of accurate
critical discussion. However, if avoiding the narrowness of Scylla,
we fall into the breadth of Charybdis, we can perhaps establish cer¬
tain new narrow categories that will serve the desired critical ends.

Now, if the common characteristic looked for is to serve as
a definitive differentia, by its application we should be able not only
to identify all works that should he called dramas, but also lo ex¬
clude from the category all that have no right to the name. It
is immediately apparent, then, that neither conflict, crisis, nor char¬
acter contrast will serve the purpose, either singly or in combination,
since all are not infrequently found, and found combined, in other
types of literature, such as the epic, the novel, and the short story.
The differentia that separates the drama from these and from all
other types of literature is, obviously, that it is written (or im¬
provised) for presentation by actors before an audience, the actors
impersonating the various characters.1 What is equally true, al¬
though not so obvious, is that this necessity for adapting the work
to the psychological requirements of a group of auditor-spectators
conditions the composition at every step, and profoundly modifies
the technique both of structure and of style, which technique is
also further modified by the material conditions of the proposed
performance.2 May we go further and say, “A play is a story
devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience” ?
Clearly, no. The stage is a convenience, but not an essential. As
for “story,” The Madras House, a recognized drama, forbids.
Here, the central incident of the performance, the sole occasion for
the meeting of the important characters, is the sale of the business

1 The element of impersonation is required to distinguish the drama from
such non-impersonative performances as the various feats of physical or men¬
tal skill (acrobatic feats, mind reading, and the like) frequently seen on the
vaudeville stage, which by no usage are given the name drama. The term
actors here connotes human beings, but even this connotation will have to go
in the case of the puppet drama.

2 The hybrid form, the so-called “closet drama,” may be defined as a form
written, by a literary convention, after the fashion of a printed stage play,
but not necessarily adaptable to actual stage production and therefore not
strictly limited by the psychological and physical conditions of the true drama.
Yet some closet dramas, such as some of the early dramas of Maeterlinck,
are sufficiently within those limits to be susceptible or stage production.

156 SCIIELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

of the House by its English owners to the American, Mr. State;
and vet this little matter of business is accomplished very casually
toward the end of the third Act as a mere parenthesis in a long
discussion between the owners and Mr. State on the real subject of
the play, the proper position cf woman in human society. Central
“story” there is none ; on its human interest side the play presents
merely a series of more or less static situations. A.gain, several
years ago the present writer was privileged to see a stage presen¬
tation of the Fifteenth Idyl of Theocritus. The performance fell
into three scenes. In the first, two Athenian ladies chatter in their
homes about more or less unrelated domestic affairs ; in the second,
the} are seen in the street proceeding toward the Temple of Venus
to witness a celebration of the Feast of Adonis ; in the third, we
visit with them the Temple celebration, upon which they comment,
and vce hear with them a professsional singer render a hymnal ode
describing the death of Adonis. The performance was thoroughly
delightful. The crowrds in the street scene and in the Temple were
so admirably managed that the auditor did not realize that they
were mute parts ; and the eye was constantly delighted. But there
was no real “story,” although there was a succession of incidents
not causally connected ; and while the performance culminated in
the singing of the ode, it was a lyrical, not a narrative, climax.
There was not even Mr. Hamilton's “character contrast,” for the
speakers were Athenian ladies of the same type and had practically
the same views. True, the work was not from the hand of a
dramatist, and its modern staging was merely an interesting, though
thoroughly enjoyable, experiment. Did this Idyl, never intended as
a drama, become one as soon as impersonated on the stage to the
satisfaction of an audience r If not, why not? If it does, the dif¬
ferentiae of conflict, crisis, character contrast, and story, all drop
out of the definition. Lut as to story, The Madras House and some
of the similar dramas of Shaw settle the question.

Accepting, then, the definition that a drama is a form written
or improvised for performance by actors before an audience, we
next note that there may, and generally do, appear in it six different
elements, namely, character, plot, idea, dialogue, atmosphere, and
spectacle;’ and that any of these six may mount to the position of

Of these terms, probably only atmosphere requires definition here. Under
that heading I include all that helps to give the spirit of the imagined place

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

157

chief interest. The typical drama centres its appeal to the spectator
in its plot, the related actions and reactions of the characters, which
derives its interest from what may be called “dramatic tension,” a
term that I shall define later. This plot may hold the attention
merely as related incidents with little or no character interest, as
in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors; or the characters may be so
penetratingly and vividly delineated, and their motives so incisively
laid bare, that the more intelligent spectators view the actions merely
as revelations of the characters of the dramatis persona, a type of
play of which the supreme examples are the tragedies of Shake¬
speare’s maturity. Here, then, character interest mounts to the
first place, but mounts through plot and not divorced from it. In
dramas of another type much fewer in number, the interest centers
in the discussion of ideas, possibly expressed objectively through
the plot, as in the morality play of Everyman or Brieux’ Damaged
Goods, possibly with the element of plot reduced well nigh to the
vanishing point, as in the cases of Barker’s The Madras House,
above referred to, and of Shaw’s Getting Married, in which latter
the problem is that of the advisable limitations (polygamous, poly-
androus, or monogamous) of the marital state and the general con¬
siderations that should condition divorce. The interest of Love’s
Labour’s Lost in its Elizabethan performances must have been de¬
pendent. not primarily upon plot, character, or central idea, but
upon the whimsicalities, satire, and general vivacity of the dialogue ;
and the same tends to be true of some modern plays, as in Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest, in which the plot finds its very
solution in a word-play, or in Kreymborg’s dainty one-act trifle,

of action, whether that place have or have not an actual geographical exist¬
ence, whether it be vague and general or definite and narrowly circumscribed,
whether the spirit arise from natural surroundings or from the tone of the
local community or both. Atmosphere is to the place what his characteriza¬
tion is to one of the dramatis persona. Both atmosphere and characterization
may be merely in general true to the locality and the person respectively; or
they may be affected by special conditions, as when a place or a character is
mooded to revelry or to mourning. Thus, atmosphere may at times seem to
reflect the spirit of the occasion rather than of the locality. Place, like char¬
acter, may be treated either realistically ( a method that gives us ‘local color”)
or with the glamour of poetic fantasy. Atmosphere may be expressed through
the characters (conceived as members of the local community), the dialogue,
costume, mooded stage setting, music, or even plot. Use of stage settings
and costume for atmosphere is to be distinguished from their use for spec¬
tacle. The latter aims to delight the eye, the former to reach the aesthetic
understanding, although of course the two aims may be achieved simul¬
taneously.

158 schelling anniversary papers

Lima Beans, a mere bubble of dialogue form. The sensuous delight
of the eye in the physical line and color of scenic effects and cos¬
tuming is, despite its strongly tragic plot, the raison d’etre of the
dance drama Sumurun and others of its ilk, which therefore we
must class as primarily spectacular. Finally, although unquestionable
examples are rare, the drama of atmosphere may be illustrated by
any skilfully executed episodic historical pageant celebrating a given
locality, by some of the plotless so-called “atmospheric preludes”
used to precede a feature picture in a few of the best moving-picture
houses,1 by Ernest Dowson’s A Pierrot of the Minute, breathing
the very magic of midnight in a moonlit glade, and possibly also by
some of Mackaye’s Yankee Fantasies and O’Neill’s lie; while The
Great Divide is fundamentally a war of two atmospheres or opposed
spiritual traditions, those of New England and of the pioneer West,
embodied in its two leading characters. And to this latter type of
drama I should be inclined to assign the staged Idyl of Theocritus
I have referred to, for to us its interest certainly centers in its pic¬
ture of the common Greek life of the period, although its staging
gave it also marked spectacular values.

Further, it must be noted that these six elements of interest are
not fixed in their relative emphases in the given play, but vary
somewhat according to the auditor and the conditions of produc¬
tion. It has repeatedly been pointed out as characteristic of Shake¬
speare’s genius that today in Hamlet he is able to hold the newsboy
in the gallery by melodramatic incident while at the same time en¬
gaging the attention of the student by philosophical speculation.
With two such different centers of interest, who shall say that the
newsboy and the student really see the same play? Again, it was
once my fortune to see Tolstoy’s Powers of Darkness acted in the
Russian language (of which I know nothing), by Russian actors,
with Russian scenery and costumes, and under close approximation
to Russian conditions. Under the circumstances the center of in¬
terest to me became, not plot or characterization, but material local
color or atmosphere. Further, I have seen Shakespeare’s Julius
Ccesar under three different sets of conditions. Mansfield’s, like
any other professional performance of the usual type, emphasized

1 The Revels at Nottingham- Castle preceding the presentation of Robin
Hood, at Grauman s Egyptian Theatre at Hollywood, California, in December,
J 922, is an excellent example. From their very nature these are not accessible
in printed form, but they are occasionally of considerable artistic excellence.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

159

character. The performance by the Ben Greet company was, to
most, interesting because of its attempt at archaeologically correct
Elizabethan staging. And, thirdly, in the unforgettable performance
of the play among the hills of Hollywood, California, one May night
in 1916, its six-hundred foot stage showing the Senate House and
the homes of Brutus and Caesar grouped with other buildings around
the Roman Forum and the central rostrum for the funeral oration,
the Roman architecture glistening under the rays of gigantic search¬
lights, while hundreds of priests, soldiers, citizens, and dancing
girls gave animation to the whole, — even the fact that the charac¬
ters were consummately impersonated by such artists as Messrs.
Tyrone Power and Dustin Farnum did not prevent them from being
dwarfed by the distances, and the main interest being centered in
the immensity of the spectacle. Assuredly, in a given play even
the elements of plot and character, usually considered indispensable
to serious classic drama may, under certain conditions, almost en¬
tirely yield place to other elements of the performance usually sub¬
ordinated. And in fact, what is the so-called “new staging” but an
attempt to restore plot and character to their intended place in pro¬
duction by the elimination of non-essential details in scenic effect
and the mooding of those remaining to emphasize the spirit of the
two, plot and character, that are normally at the heart of the work?

Finally in this connection, it should be noted that the psycho¬
logical appeal of the play differs markedly according to which of
these elements is stressed, no matter whether the stressing be de¬
termined by the author or by the director. The appeals of the plot
and the character elements, and probably also of the atmospheric
element, are largely, in an effective drama, emotional. That of the
play of idea is primarily intellectual, possibly even philosophic; and
to the intellectual type belongs also the play whose chief charm lies
in its witty dialogue. The appeal of the spectacular play is funda¬
mentally sensuous, an appeal to the eye, frequently combined also
with musical appeals to the ear. Thus, each of these types of play
tends to single out its own type of audience; and on the other hand,
the comparative numbers of the various types of mind that can be
counted on as prospective auditors will, taken in connection with the
peculiar powers, purposes, and proclivities of the writers of a
period, largely affect the comparative popularities of the various
types.

I (>o

SCI TELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Of the six elements above referred to, 1 o vever, that which on
the whole assumes the position of greatest prominence in the theory
of the drama is plot, because in plays of incident it is the chief
interest, in plays of character it is the chiel channel through which
character dramatically expresses itself, and even in plays of idea it
is usually the means by which the point at issue is objectively pre¬
sented to the audience. It therefore becomes a matter of the iirst
importance in dramatic theory to inquire what is the indispensable
element in plot. Is it will in conflict with obstacles, or crisis, or con¬
trast? Or is it something more fundamental and comprehensive than
any of these, to which these, when they occur, are subsidiary?
Omitting from consideration such plays as The Madras House and
Shaw’s Getting Married, in both of which the concatenation of re¬
lated incidents that we call plot is practically non-existent, is there
any one condition fulfilled by all the plots of Agamemnon, A? I on
Like It, Hamlet, Ghosts, Chains, Every Man in His Humour, Gen¬
eral John Reagan, and the other plotted plays that have been cited,
with varying degrees of justice, as disproving the theories of will,
conflict, and crisis, mentioned above?

I believe that there is such a common condition They all con¬
tain such a combination of conditions, forces, or incidents about a
character or characters as to create in the auditor, in a greater or
less degree, curiosity or concern with regard to the outcome, to
which outcome he looks forward with emotions either of pleasure
or of an anxiety that possibly deepens to dread. On the quality that
produces this concern depends their interest, so far as that interest
is dependent on plot. Will Agamemnon fall a victim to Clytem-
nestra? Will Hamlet avenge his murdered father, and how? How
long will it be before the tantalizing boyish disguise that forms prac¬
tically the only barrier between Rosalind and Orlando is removed,
and the inevitable wedding takes place ? Will Brainworm, the clever
double-dealing servant in Every Man in His Humour, succeed in his
devices as he passes from disguise to disguise until finally his young
master, Edward Knowell, punishes the elder Knowed’s “impertinent
search-’ after the young man and incidentally marries the fair Mis¬
tress Bridget? Will Oswald Alving be overtaken by the horrible
fate that wre see darkening about him as we learn more and more

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

161

of his mother’s socially-enforced marital relations with his profligate
father and of the son’s interviews with his physician? In Chains,
will Richard Wilson and his fellow clerk have sufficient initiative
and courage to escape from the killing monotony of their daily office
routine into other lives of fresh opportunity and renewed inspira¬
tion? In General John Reagan, will Dr. O’Grady succeed in per¬
petrating his daring hoax upon the townspeople of Ballymoy and
fool them into erecting an expensive statue to their glorious, but
entirely mythical, fellow townsman, the Liberator of Bolivia? What¬
ever other differences may exist between these various plays, this
element of arousing and maintaining an interest in the outcome is
common to them all. This quality we may call dramatic tension.
And in proportion as this interest is more or less acute in the various
plays and in their various parts, there we may say that this dramatic
tension exists in a greater or a less degree. A play to whose out¬
come you are indifferent is, so far as its plot is concerned, a failure.
Piquancy of dialogue, humor in individual situations, spectacular
procession, the sway of line and color in the dance, the rhythm and
tonal beauty of voice or instrument, — all these may supplement it,
as frequently in Shakespeare, or may dilute it, as in the average
musical comedy, or may serve in lieu of it, as in most so-called
revues. And even in a powerfully dramatic play, in certain scenes
this interest may be for the moment suspended while we resign
ourselves to one of the other elements of stage delight. But a suc¬
cessful plot, as such, will keep more or less alive throughout the
play of which it is the core, the interest of the audience as to what
experience of the characters is to follow, and “how it will all end.”

It may be asked why we should not here use the familiar term
suspense. As a matter of fact, suspense and dramatic tension are
largely synonymous. But suspense is both too narrow a term and
too broad. It usually connotes a high degree of such tension, delib¬
erately aggravated by climaxed stimulation and artful delay at
critical moments in the performance ; while dramatic tension has its
inception as soon as the auditor begins to feel the earliest glimmers
of anticipation concerning the incident to ensue, and is dependent
not merely upon climax and delay, but also upon many more subtle
considerations of technique. On the other hand, the term suspense
may also be extended to cover such a performance as that of the
vaudeville equilibrist who, having piled table upon table and upon

16 2 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

them chair upon chair, seats himself at the swaying summit, reading
a newspaper, and when the swayings have inch by inch increased
to a point just beyond that permitting a return, does a forty-foot
back fall with the mass and finally saves himself from a broken
neck by a back somersault. Here the suspense may be nerve-racking,
but the cause is not “dramatic,” being real physical danger deliber¬
ately self-created and encountered in propria persona, not a fictitious
danger springing from imagined external sources and assailing an
imaginary character impersonated by an actor. To express the pre¬
cise shade of meaning desired in dramaturgy, the phrase dramatic
tension seems the most exact and the least liable to misinterpreta¬
tion.1 But call it what one please, it is a quality that never, to my
knowledge, has been proposed as the one quality essential to plot-
drama.

Now, this dramatic tension has evident relations to all three of
the elements that have each heretofore been asserted to be the one
prime essential of drama. It generally involves (i) wills in conflict
with obstacles, (2) crisis, and (3) character contrast, but it is not
identical with any one of them. True, it frequently reaches its
highest degree of development in that type of play in which power¬
ful will is pitted against powerful will. True also, in such a con¬
flict the scene d faire is that of the decisive point or crisis. It is
true, too, that while such a conflict may arise from an antagonism
between the respective interests of two similar type-characters, as in
the struggle of rival capitalists or rival speculators, it is usually
motivated also by differences in point of view and these arise either
from contrasts in the characters of the opponents or from differ¬
ences in the environment that mould character. Thus, character
contrast usually accompanies, and is even frequently the basis of,

1 The use of the word dramatic in this connection is not intended to deny
the existence of a similar tension in connection with such plotted literary types
as the novel. Plot is of course a cross category appearing elsewhere in
literature than in the drama, a fact that Brunetiere ignores, confining his
discussion as he does to the contrast between drama, epic, and lyric. Nor
does the employment of the phrase dramatic tension, as above defined, deny
that certain kinds of plot materials are better adapted than others to stage
use, as Mr. Archer points out in the passage quoted. The phrase is simply
used to denote a quality that distinguishes plot-drama from other types of
stage performances. The phrase plot tension might be substituted for it in
part, but will not ht the mere situation tension that sometimes appears in
connection with conflict-type VI, and also ignores certain elements of effec¬
tiveness that can be contributed to such plot tension by the facilities of the
drama alone.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA 163

dramatic conflict, and furthermore is valuable as directing the sym¬
pathies of the audience toward one of the opposed parties rather
than the other; as the conflict of Portia with Shylock over the life
of Antonio not only has its basis in the differences of race, religion,
and social position that are fundamental to the plot, but is further
emphasized by contrasts in moral attitudes, sex, and personal beauty
that powerfully aid in enlisting our sympathies as the author desires.
But wholly aside from these plot functions, such character con¬
trasts always tend to enter because they give esthetic relief and
balance to the composition, and further because a dramatist with an
eye to the essential diversity of life (and what is a dramatist without
it?) cannot help representing that diversity in his portrayals. Even
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would reveal points of difference if
we were permitted to see them for two minutes talking alone. Thus,
character contrast is an element usually present with dramatic ten¬
sion ; but it by no means always gives this tension even when pres¬
ent. There is character contrast between Portia and Launcelot
Gobbo, but no dramatic tension arises between them.

Neither is present conflict of wills essential to dramatic tension,
which may exist, although probably not in the highest degree, with¬
out it. The fact is, plot-plays may be classified into at least six
simple types as to the presence and nature of the so-called “conflict”
element, with innumerable possibilities of combination. A survey
of these types will be helpful to our discussion.

I. Ignoring such cases as the staged Fifteenth Idyl of Theocritus,
in which there is no conflict because there is no plot, it neverthe¬
less remains true that there are plot-plays in which, while there are
two opposed sides, the assailing side is so impersonal, and usually
so irresistible, that no real resistance, and therefore no real conflict,
is possible. Such a play is St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson, whose
Job-like central character is without provocation deprived of well
nigh all that makes life worth living by repeated blows from an ap¬
parently heartless superior force that it would be mockery to call
Providence and blasphemy to give a higher name. Again, here be¬
longs Synge’s Riders to the Sea, in which the old Maurya, who has
already seen five of her sons drowned, can do no more than feebly
grumble her protests as the sixth son starts on the journey in which
the sea gathers him also to his brothers. Here, too, belongs Gals¬
worthy’s Justice, in which the clerk Falder, having raised a check, his

1 64 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

first offense, is caught in the meshes of the law and after imprison¬
ment and discharge is slowly hounded to suicide by the impossibility
of living down the disgrace. In this category is found also Sutro’s
The Man on the Kerb, in which is pictured the plight of a man
nearly broken by his fight with the economics and the heartlessness
of the world. True, the man undergoes a slight struggle as to
whether he will keep the purse his wife has stolen and both are
tempted to commit suicide, but these are merely emphasizing inci¬
dents ; and the play can scarcely be said to have a crisis or turning-
point as the position of the man at the end is practically the same as
at the beginning. Maeterlinck, in two of his most striking one-act
plays, has pictured the approach of death to life — in L'Intruse, where
Death enters the house and snatches away a member of the house¬
hold never even seen by the auditor, and in L’lnterieur, where almost
throughout the play the body of the drowned girl is being slowly
borne from the river to the home of her unwitting parents and sis¬
ters. And here we must place Miss Baker’s Chains, with its pic¬
ture of the fruitless desire of its clerks to escape from the life-sap-
ping round of their drudgery, one by emigration, another by mar¬
riage, only to find that that same drudgery has killed their initia¬
tive, so that the conflict never rises above the plane of ineffectual
longing.

In all of these cases, whether the opposed force be Death, or
Fate, or Titanic physical forces, or the machinery of the law, or
social inhumanity, or inertia, its impersonality or its vastness or
both make escape so hopeless that we can only helplessly watch
the approach of the impending doom as through a telescope one
might watch the feeble fiutterings of a distant bird fixed by the eye
of a snake. The effect is not in the fullest sense of the term dra¬
matic — it is, in serious drama, either one of pathos or, if the doom
be sufficiently grisly, one of horror.

In this same category should be included also such a farce as
the Comedy of Errors, in which the characters wander through the
body of the play in comic bewilderment, caught in an invisible net¬
work of mistakes of which none can be aware. Here, as in many
other entanglements in which mere misunderstandings are the com¬
plicating force, the characters cannot effectively struggle because
they do not understand the nature of the difficulty, and the disen¬
tanglement finally occurs through the mere chance that brings the

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA 165

brothers face to face and discloses the common cause of their re¬
spective perplexities.

II. Coming to the plane in which mortal attacks mortal, we next
encounter the type of play in which the central character, or pro¬
tagonist, is victimized by the antagonist, the protagonist being
wholly unconscious of the antagonist’s attitude toward him. The
typical tragedy of this variety is Othello. Save for a brief paren¬
thesis of some one hundred lines at the end of the third Act, Othello
feels no hostility toward “honest, honest Iago” until the duplicity
of the latter is revealed to him at the end of the play. Othello’s
struggle is almost wholly an internal one between his love for his
wife and his recognition of the apparently steadily increasing evi¬
dence of her infidelity. This type as a pure form in tragedy is an
uncommon one, as the motives that could bring about such an un¬
provoked attack upon a wrorthy central figure are few. In Othello
it appears to be, to use Coleridge’s phrase, the “motiveless malignity”
of Iago. In humorous drama the type is represented by William
DeMille’s one-act farce Poor Old Jim, where the central character,
overgiven to looking on the wine when it is red, is made to believe
by his wife and his physician that he has died from the effects of
his drinking and is listening to them as a disembodied spirit. Only
the fact that their motive is his reform raises this above the level
of a staged practical joke.

III. Opposed to the form last mentioned is that in which the
protagonist is throughout conscious of his intentions but his an¬
tagonists (can the w-ord here be properly used?) are not. To this
type belongs the gentle sermon, The Passing of the Third Floor
Back, with its angelic Visitant who, appealing to the best in each of
the wrangling roomers in the boarding-house woos them back to
harmony and peace. Here, too, in the domain of tragedy, belongs
the Agamemnon, of which the protagonist, Clytemnestra (a part
three times as long as the comparatively brief title role) lures her
unsuspecting husband into the hall that is to see his murder, while
without, the fated Cassandra wails his death before helplessly enter¬
ing to meet her own foreseen doom. To be here classified is also
Jonson’s Epicene, with its fooling of the gulled uncle, Morose, to
the top of his bent, although the protagonistic attack upon him is
two-fold, the first an assault upon his hatred of noise, thrust into
the foreground with the madcap Truewit as prime mover, and the

1 66 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

other upon his design to disinherit his nephew Dauphine by his mar¬
riage, with the guile of the nephew’s self-protective stratagem in
palming off upon him a boy for a wife masked from the audience
until the end of the last Act.1 Structurally, therefore, Epicene is
remarkable in that Jonson occupies the attention both of Morose and
of the audience by a feigned attack while the real attack is being de¬
livered at another point and by an apparently rather inactive person.

In both this and the preceding class it will be observed that the
term conflict is really misleading, since in any ordinary sense ex¬
cept that in which the struggle is purely subjective, conflict denotes
a strife in which two parties are actively and consciously at odds. It
should also be observed that in practice the distinction between types
II and III is not always easy, inasmuch as the one-sidedness of the
attack in each case tends to make the distinction between the very
terms protagonist and antagonist disappear, as witness the case of
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra just cited. It is only because Othello
has a much longer part, actively participates in the tragic destruction
of his own happiness, and is the principal actor in the last half of
the play, that we are enabled to classify that play in type II instead
.of with Agamemnon.

IV. At length we come to the type that is usually called drama
par excellence, the form in which two wills meet in head-on col¬
lision. Of this there are conceivable three simple sub-types. First,
there is the variety in which the collision is physical. This prob¬
ably does not occur in pure form in the higher drama, but is found
in the knock-about farce of the minstrel and the lowest vaudeville
stages. A climax of this kind, however, sometimes appears in
somewhat higher drama, as in the case of the duel between the mur¬
derer and the avenger in The Corsican Brothers, and in Quo Vadis
the scene in the Roman arena in which the wild aurochs bearing the
bound body of the heroine has its neck broken by the main strength
of her weaponless defender, the gigantic slave Ursus.

Second, there is the variety that depends on pure superiority of
will power, of which a good illustration is to be found in the main
plot of The Taming of the Shrew, where, if we take the text of
Shakespeare in its plain surface meaning and not with Miss Mar-

1 Even the hints given in Acts I and
match assign a misleading motive for
design.

II that Dauphine is forwarding the
it and completely obscure his real

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

167

lowe’s subtilized interpretation, Petruchio simply browbeats Kath¬
erine into submission. Part I of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, in the
scenes presented on the stage, also mainly exhibits the pure “will
to win” directed against a series of antagonists, although of course
the military atmosphere demands much physical conflict behind the
scenes.

Third, there is the duel of intellect of what may be called the
“trap drama.” Here each of the opposing wills is conscious of the
hostility, and usually also of the general purposes of the other, but
not of the specific methods that the other will employ, so that each
is endeavoring to catch the other unawares in a misstep that will
prove his undoing. Here belong many, perhaps the majority, of
the most powerful dramas now on the boards. The list is headed
by Hamlet, in which the King, the antagonist, fighting from ambush,
sets no less than five traps for the Prince, the last triple-jawed and
successful, while Hamlet himself, also fighting from ambush, sets
one trap for the King — the “Mouse-trap” — and at last, by direct
physical attack, involves the King in the meshes of his own final
stratagem. The bond-plot of The Merchant of Venice is again a
case of the trapper trapped. A brilliant modern example of the
same battle of wits is Louis N. Parker’s Disraeli, with the English
prime minister and the agents of Russia battling for control of the
Suez Canal and England’s direct route to India. Generally speak¬
ing, the staged detective story and the “crook play” tend likewise to
be of this description.

V. Related to the “trap” type just mentioned, and somewhat
allied also to type I, the unavailing conflict with an impersonal force,
is the play centering about the delayed revelation of a fatal fact.
Here belongs what is generally reputed the greatest of Greek dramas,
the CEdipus Rex. CEdipus, benevolent and beloved of his people,
in his search for the slayer of the former King Laius, is astounded
to learn that he himself is the criminal, and that he has unknowingly
fulfilled the prophecy that he should kill his father and wed his own
mother. He has been trapped by Fate. Of a similar type, but
with a happy ending, is Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, in which the
young Jew, David Quixano, at the crisis of the play suddenly learns
that the Christian girl whom he wishes to marry is no other than
the daughter of the Russian general who superintended the pitiless
massacre of all the other members of the Quixano familv at KNhi-

1 68

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

nev. In the fourth Act, however, even this awful fact is burned
away in the great crucible of American democracy and forms the
most forcible dramatic justification for the titular idea of the play.

VI. Lastly, we may mention the type of drama that does not
directly represent a conflict in progress, but reveals the circum¬
stances after the conflict is over. An illustration of this is to be
found in Sutro’s The Open Door. This little one-act play is very
instructive as showing the fallaciousness of all the other elements — •
staged conflict, crisis, and character contrast — that have been al¬
leged to be the differentia of the genus drama. In a midnight con¬
versation with her guest, Sir Geoffrey Transom, on the eve of his
departure and while the rest of the house is asleep, Lady Tormin-
ster with womanly tact and modest candor discloses to him that
prior to her marriage, eight years before, she had really loved him,
and that his silent withdrawal in favor of his best friend, now her
husband, had been a pitiful but irrevocable mistake for both. The
total effect of the play is one of pathos, the past conflict (again,
can one here properly use the word?) having been one of mere
tension without action; but present dramatic tension is also created
for the audience in the very gradual unfolding of the situation, as
well as character interest in the dignified skill of the woman’s revela¬
tion and in the high-minded simplicity of the man’s acquiescence in
the hopelessness of their love. There is no conflict between the two
characters, even her diplomacy in bringing him . to his confession
being concealed from the audience until she later avows it; no
change occurs during the play except that the man admits his love
for her and learns of her love for him, thereafter acting just as he
had previously intended to act; there is no crisis in any ordinary
dramaturgic sense of the term, although there is a period of height¬
ened interest at and immediately following her disclosure; and the
two characters have no more contrast than is involved in the neces¬
sary difference of their sexes in the given plot situation, being simply
well bred, well educated, high-minded man and woman. In brief,
the charm of the play is almost wholly in the glimpse that it gives
us into two souls in the most candid hour of their lives.

Miss Glaspell’s play, Trifles, is a modification of the same type,
employing the unveiling of a principal past conflict to settle a present
problem. Two women stand in the kitchen of a farm-house in
which a murder has just been committed, and reading the little signs

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA 169

most clearly visible to a woman’s eye, gradually weave together the
story of the wife’s cheerless life and of the wanton killing by her
husband of the bird she loved, and they determine to destroy the
evidence they have of her motive for strangling the man.1 Barrie’s
The Twelve Pound Look is also mainly concerned with the revelation
of the motive of Sir Harry’s first wife in leaving him years before;
and Middleton’s Tradition, too, is a generally static situation, almost
solely concerned with the exposition of the mental attitudes of the
father and the daughter that had determined their past action, the
final fillip of interest coming in the hint that the daughter, in her
later generation, has simply put into execution the suppressed feel¬
ings of her mother. In fact, this type is best adapted to the one act
play, which allows but little time for the progress of a full present
conflict, and which is brief enough to dispense with that excitement
of present action generally advisable to hold the attention of an
audience through the strain of a full evening’s performance. Yet we
must not forget that parallel with Trifles in their use of the truth
concerning a past conflict to determine the ending of one in the
present, are such important full-length dramas as Ibsen’s Rosmers-
holm and Ghosts.

There are of course many combinations of these six types. Mac¬
beth, for instance, if one views Macbeth himself as the protagonist,
is of type III to the end of the second Act and then becomes pre¬
dominantly type IV, but Macbeth is himself the victim of the weird
sisters, from which standpoint the play has a second “conflict” of
type II and ends with the springing of a trap of type V. And
study of the combinations of types in plays with a number of plots
and subplots will often reveal to the student of dramaturgy the pos¬
sibilities of mingling and massing types of various degrees of ef¬
fectiveness, as in the case of The Merchant of Venice, where among
the five plot-threads the only one that belongs to the powerful type
IV is made the dramatic climax (not crisis) in the penultimate Act.
But enough has been said, it is hoped, to make clear the main point,

1 In Trifles, too, there is little character contrast. The two women who
piece together the story are almost completely undifferentiated, and we see
very little of the three men who appear at the beginning and end of the play.
Some slight emphasis is laid upon the superiority of the women over the
men in observation and sympathy, but this is not a matter of individual char¬
acter and mainly aids the plot machinery. The greatest contrast in the play
is that between the suffering wife and the brutal husband, neither of whom
is seen by the audience.

i ;o

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

namely, that the frequently encountered and highly stimulating type
IV, in which two wills meet in head-on collision, has been too gen¬
erally accepted as embodying the one essential of all drama ; and that
types I and V, neither of which centers in a two-sided conflict between
personal antagonists, and types II and III, neither of which contains
a conflict unless we expand that term far beyond its usual sense,
are all represented by acknowledgedly great plays ; and that even
type VI, in the pure form of which, staged conflict may, from the
point of view of the audience, be wholly lacking and in which crisis
and contrast may also be practically absent, may be made into an
interesting play by mere force of the gradual revelation of a conflict
in the past.

What, then, is apparently the sole trait that all of these plot-
types have in common ? it is merely that they all raise a question or
a series of questions that the auditors want to see answered. How
has a certain character or group of characters been affected, or how
will he, she, or they be affected, by certain conditions ? With the
first apprehension of this question by the auditor begins dramatic
tension. With its complete answering dramatic tension for the time
being ceases.

How may dramatic tension be most surely and effectively created ?
That is a question for an entire work upon dramaturgy. Some
points entering into the matter may, however, be sketchily suggested.
It would seem that the dramatic tension of a play is to be gaged by
the nervous tension of the auditor. This must be measured, if at
all, by the psychologist, and probably will vary markedly in indi¬
viduals according to their temperaments, education, and past ex¬
periences. Roughly we may say that the tension increases with the
gravity of the issues at stake, from mere temporary personal discom¬
fort through various gradations of physical and spiritual endangering
of a character’s well-being to death, torture, and perdition.1 It also
increases with the direct presentation of the decisive scenes of the
story, with the auditor’s sympathy for the chief character involved,
and, within certain limits, with the magnitude of the odds against
him. With these are involved also concentration, so far as is
compatible with the mental freshness of the auditor; retardation of
effects; and climax, involving also the treatment of what may be

1 Personally, the present writer is acutely sensitive to scenes of physical
torture, more so than to the presentation of death.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA

1 71

called “the extreme case." Dramatic tension is especially dependent
upon a convincing, vivid sincerity of presentation that will induce the
auditor to forget that what he is witnessing is not actual life, but
merely its feigned reflection; and this verisimilitude is itself the
product of highly complex factors, involving psychological verity,
sincere non-conventionalized acting, insistent emotionalized sugges¬
tion of the threatening danger, fitness (so far as the auditor has
a keen sense of it) of the characters and incidents to each other
and to the imagined time and place of action, the use of an apt poetic
or prose medium of expression, and the maintenance of a serious
tone. It must also be noted that any emphasis upon beauty, either
of conception, of dramatic detail, or of tone, tends to lessen the
poignancy of the auditor’s’ feeling in the extreme instance, and that
we express this fact when we call sordidly realistic tragedy such as
Pemberton King’s Cocaine “unrelieved.” The limitations of space
forbid further elaboration.

But, it must be insisted, dramatic tension appears to be the es¬
sential desideratum only for the plot-play. There are also theatrical
compositions that cannot easily be denied the name drama and that
hold the attention, not by the dramatic tenseness of a plot thread,
but by propounding a problem for oral discussion, by the witty dia¬
logue or the inherent humor of the individual scenes, by charming
the ear through song or music, or by delighting the eye through the
line, color, and light of spectacle or dance. These varieties of play
we may grade in artistic dignity as they increase in significance of
content and in esthetic adequacy of form ; we may even, if we
please, arbitrarily reserve the term drama for a somewhat dignified
play of the plotted variety; but we must recognize that such a nar¬
rowing is purely arbitrary, and that we shall then be compelled to
find some other equally dignified term or terms to apply to those
performances in which actors assume fictitious roles but in which
the element of plot is of little or no importance. And while it is
probably true that in stage productions the exhibition of will pitted
against will must always continue to have the strongest appeal for
the average audience of a given period, as it had in the ancient
Roman arena and as it has in the modern football field, it is equally
true that there are in the world’s great drama a number of notable
examples of plot-types I, II, III, and V ; that the mass of men are
also strongly appealed to by the sensuous charm of spectacle; and

172

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

that the appreciation of the passive plot-type VI, and of the intellec¬
tual drama of discussion, will probably increase with the further
spread and development of human intelligence. In short, it cannot be
maintained that any plot element whatever is essential to all drama, as
there are at least five other centers of interest to any one of which
plot may yield precedence and before some of which it may totally
disappear; nor, I believe, even in plot-drama is it true that either
conflict, crisis, or character contrast is the one essential element in
question. That position, it would seem, must rather be assigned to
dramatic tension , which alone is necessarily present in all of the
six “conflict” types.

THE MARGINALI \ OF S T. C.

John Louis Ha.sev

President of the Central High School, Philadelphia

SCHOLARS who concern themsebes mainly with the substance
of literature are often at a loss ro account for the vagaries of
the bibliophile. The professional book-collector will at times
encourage fads and fashions quite as arbitrary as those that control
human apparel. Yesterday it was Elzevirs, Dibdiniana, or Cruik-
shankiana ; to-day it is Blake, Lamb or Keats, to-morrow it will be
- — who knows? Certain poets, like Shelley or the Tennyson of the
private off-prints, are as treasure-trove to the collector; others, like
Byron or Wordsworth, have never developed a large following.
Dickens and Thackeray items in orig’nal part- are guarded in burglar-
proof vaults; but who boasts of his first editions of Scott or of
George Elict? In the contemporary field of letters, the earlier titles
of Mr. Maurice Hewlett or of Mr. Joseph Conrad are highly prized
while simiiar works of other equally notable writers are neglected.

The rapidly growing interest in what we call “association books”
can readily be understood. The instinct that would preserve a glove
presumably worn bv Shakespeare or a pen-holder used by Lincoln
would likewise treasure a particular copy of a book that had once
been owned and read by a grea* man. In view of that fact not a
few enterprising forgers have scrawled the name of William Shake¬
speare in ancient tomes to give them an added value. George
Washington’s weakness for writing his autograph on the title-page
of books that he owned established an alluring precedent for the
industrious rascals who continue to sign his name on the title-pages
of books that he might have owned, but did not. Many a fastidious
bibliophile will denounce all manner of inscription in a book, but
the more knowing wdl alwavs except from such denunciation those
few chosen spirits whose desecrarion of the printed page gives to
the fortunate volume a value far beyond its original worth. Among
the elect none took greater liberties with other men’s property nor

174 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

became more confirmed in the habit of critical annotation than Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.

Most students of literature know that Coleridge’s fondness for
inscribing marginal comments in books was the subject of memorable
discussion in his own life time from the pen of Charles Lamb and
somewhat later from Thomas De Quincey. They likewise know
that Coleridge was more deeply read in philosophy, theology, nay, in
the whole range of letters, than any other man of his generation,
and that few writers of any age have left behind them obiter dicta
to compare in sheer intellectual value with the marginalia or the
casual table-talk of S. T. C. In spite of these facts, the volumes
annotated by Coleridge have never commanded widespread biblio¬
graphical interest and they do not even now arouse the enthusiasm
of collectors who specialize in “association books.” For the scholar,
however, and for others who have a sense of absolute values, the
field is one of great interest, though it requires patience to follow
the trail of the elusive volumes that have become scattered all over
England and America during the past century.

Lamb, in his well-known reference at the conclusion of his essay.
The Two Races of Men, wrote :

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of
showing it ; or, if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books ; but let
it be to such a one as S. T. C. ; he will return them (generally anticipating the
time appointed) with usury, enriched with annotations tripling their value.
I have had experience. Many of these precious MSS. of his (in matter
oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals),
in no very clerkly hand— legible in my Daniel, in old Burton, in Sir Thomas
Browne, and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas, wandering
in Pagan lands. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library against
S. T. C.

This passage gives a specific clue to four books. “My Daniel”
was the two-volume edition of Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Works
(i7I8) and contained annotations by Lamb as well as numerous
comments by Coleridge. Three of Coleridge’s autograph letters were
afterwards inserted on the fly-leaves. After Lamb’s death the two
volumes were presented by Mary Lamb to Registrar Hazlitt. Years
later they passed into the possession of St. Clair Baddeley and were
sold at auction by Sotheby’s on March 22, 1905.

“Old Burton” was a copy of the 1621 quarto of The Anatomy
of Melancholy, but unfortunately it has disappeared from view.

THE MARGINALIA OF S. T. C.

175

The same fate apparently befell Lamb’s folio copy of Sir Thomas
Browne’s Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors (1658), al¬
though it was for a time in the Hazlitt family. It is interesting to
note that the Coleridge marginalia on Browne communicated to
Blackioood’s Magazine in 1819 by the faithful Dr. James Gillman
were probably the first of S. T. C.’s annotations to receive formal
publication.

Lamb’s “Greville” was the Certaine Learned and Elegant IVorkes
of the Right Honorable Fulke, Lord Brooke, published in 1633. Its
early wanderings after the death of Lamb are not known, but a
letter to the Athenceum (1893, II, p. 322) indicated that the volume
was then in the hands of a Liverpool bookseller, who sold it to Mr.
H. S. Young, the author of the communication. Later it passed to
Dr. John Taylor Brown, and when it was sold with his books by
Sotheby’s on April 20, 1903, was the occasion for another note to
the Athenceum (1903, II, p. 531), this time by the poet’s grandson,
Ernest Hartley Coleridge.

In his intimate essay on Old China, Lamb wrote feelingly of his
folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which he eyed for weeks in a Covent
Garden bookshop before he made up his mind to purchase it for
fifteen or sixteen shillings and thus postpone the purchase of a much
needed new suit of clothes. Naturally, Coleridge borrowed the book
in due course and made numerous inscriptions on its margins, in¬
cluding the pathetic “God bless you, dear Charles Lamb ; I am dying:
I feel I have not many weeks left.” This famous folio (1679)
passed into the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel F. Cunningham and was
acquired by the British Museum in 1876 for £25. The price seems
absurdly low, even for that early date.

During 1848 a portion of the library of Charles Lamb was offered
for sale by Bartlett and Welford of New York City. Among the
books catalogued were five that contained annotations by S. T. C.
All five were purchased by George T. Strong, of New York City.
For the first of these books, Amory’s Life of John Buncle (n. d.),
we have, so to speak, a complete pedigree. At the sale of Mr.
Strong’s library it was bought by Mr. C. T. Frederickson, and at
the Frederickson Sale it passed to Dodd, Mead & Co., who sold it
to Mr. Harry B. Smith, the well-known opera librettist and dramatist.
He in turn disposed of it some years ago to the Rosenbach Company,
of Philadelphia and New York, wrho now (1922) own the book.

176 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The second book, The Historie of Philip de Comines (folio, 1674)1
followed exactly the same course and passed through the same
owners’ hands to the Rosenbach Company. The annotations in these
volumes were relatively few and have not been printed.

The third book was Donne’s Poems (1669), which followed the
first two as far as Dodd, Mead & Co., but was sold by them to Mr.
Harris Arnold of New York City. In it Coleridge wrote: “I shall
die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed
that. I bescribbled your book.” The valuable critical notes with which
S. T. C. enriched the volume are familiar to students. Similarly the
notes in the last two works, John Petvin’s Letters Concerning the
Mind (1750) and John Reynold’s God’s Revenge Against the Crying
and Execrable Sin of Murder (1651), have been edited in part, but
the books themselves have disappeared from view.

Although the apparent loss of these interesting volumes is regret¬
table, a more disheartening story remains to be told of the thirty-nine
items of Coleridge marginalia advertised for sale in 1884 by Scribner
and Welford of New York. Those books came from the library of
Dr. Joseph Henry Green, who was Coleridge’s most faithful disciple.
About one third of them were German works, mainly philosophical
in character; a few were Italian treatises of similar nature, but the
lot also included a few really important items. A copy of Descartes’
Opera Philosophica (1685) and of Quarles’ Emblems (1678) have
vanished with the rest. Better fortune attended the fine old folio,
Reliquce Baxteriarue: or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most
Memorable Passages of His Life and Times (1696), which was the
third item in the Scribner and Welford catalog. Our interest in the
volume begins when it was in George H. Frere’s library. According
to Frere’s own manuscript note on the inside cover, he lent the book
to Coleridge, who inscribed various critical and personal annotations
of the greatest interest. After various vicissitudes the folio passed
into the possession of Mr. Harry B. Smith, who afterwards disposed
of it to the Rosenbach Company. Some of the critical marginalia
have been printed, but the personal notes have not been made public.
Another noteworthy item from Dr. Green’s library was Thomas Ran¬
dolph’s Poems (1652), which was a presentation copy from Cole¬
ridge to Southey. In 1902 it was in the hands of the late George D.
Smith and is now (192 2) in the library of Mr. William Thomas
Arnold of New York City.

THE MARGINALIA OF S. T. C.

1 77

Up to 1903 the longest list of Coleridge marginalia extant was the
seventy-nine volumes catalogued as belonging to the British Museum.
In that year the present writer compiled a list of three hundred and
forty-one marginalia in his privately printed Bibliography of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Since that time the number has grown to more
than four hundred and justifies the belief that there are over live
hundred books in existence that contain autograph inscriptions of
some sort by Coleridge. A few of those that have come to light
since 1903 may be described as typical of the sort of books that
Coleridge read and as indicative of the wide range of his intellectual
interest.

Sotheby’s in 1904 sold a copy of Acta Seminarii Regii et Soci-
etatis Philologiccc Lipsiensis (1811), in which Coleridge had written
this note on the fly-leaf : “Given to Hartley Coleridge by his father,
with a promise on the part of said H. C. that he will bona-fide read
thro’ them.” Anyone familiar with the work may well question
whether Hartley kept that rash promise. The volume later passed
into the hands of his brother, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, and even¬
tually became part of the fine set of Coleridgeana that was offered
for sale by J. Pearson of London in 1911. That set was included
in the important Robinson Sale disposed of by auction at Anderson’s
in New York on February 26, 1918, when this particular volume was
sold for fifty dollars.

In the library of Sir William Osier is a copy of Browne’s Religio
Medici (1831) that was annotated by S. T. C., who was a close stu¬
dent of Browne. There are in existence at least three copies of
Religio Medici containing Coleridge’s comments. Up to the present
time those marginalia have not been printed. The same holds true
of the numerous critical notes by S. T. C. in a folio copy of Chap¬
man’s Homer (1616), which was once the property of Sara Hutchin¬
son and after her death passed into the hands of her brother-in-law,
William Wordsworth.

Among the numerous copies of Coleridge’s own works containing
his annotations or other autograph additions only a few can be
mentioned. Sotheby’s in 1903 sold a copy of the rare Fears in
Solitude (1798) with an inserted letter dated February 9, 1819, in
which Coleridge spoke of Hazlitt’s hatred of him and deplored that
critic’s characterization of Christabel as an obscene poem. S. T. C.
was evidently referring to the boorish critique of Christabel that had

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

178

appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In the Pearson set of Cole-
ridgeana already mentioned was a copy of the third edition of
Remorse (1813) which was presented by the poet to the Rev. Edward
Coleridge. It contained an appropriate inscription and a long signed
note referring to the savage criticism of the play in the Quarterly
Review. The note reads in part : “The concluding paragraph of this
Review, far more injurious to me than all the malignities of the
Edinburgh, affords an instance of insolent intrusion into the sacred¬
ness of private life, surpassed only by the detestable attack on my
dear friend Charles Lamb, perpetrated by the same Aristarchus,
Mr. J. Gifford.”

Of somewhat less personal interest are an inscribed copy of
Sibylline Leaves (1817), presented by Coleridge to his sister-in-law,
Miss Fricker, an inscribed copy of Wallenstein (1800), presented to
the Rev. Mr. Roskilly, and a copy of the Statesman’s Manual (1816),
presented to Joseph Cottle and afterwards part of the Buxton For¬
man Library.

The late Professor Edward Dowden owned an interesting folio
copy of Abraham Cowley’s Works (1681), which had belonged to
Wordsworth and had been sold with some of that poet’s other books
in 1859. In addition to a long penciled note by S. T. C. it contained
on the inside cover at the end a grotesque penciled head with the
legend . Drawn by S. i . Coleridge entirely out of his own fancy,
October 10, 1801 — he being then only 29 years of age — yea, not 29,
by 10 days.”

Puttick’s in 1905 sold at auction a copy of Eikon Basilike (1649),
in which had been inserted a five-page autograph letter by S. T. C.
relating to the work and discussing the question of its authorship.
The present whereabouts of that volume has not been traced.

Mr. William Harris Arnold of New York City numbers among
his literary treasures a small inscribed copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost
which Coleridge presented in 1808 to Mrs. Thomas Clarkson, wife
of the author of History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Cole¬
ridge s article on that book in the Edinburgh Review was the only
formal review that he ever published.

In 1907 Mr. Albert Sutton, a Manchester bookseller, offered for
sale a copy of John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) containing
many long and valuable annotations made by S. T. C. in 1824. Smith
had been a fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and his discourses

THE MARGINALIA OF S. T. C.

179

on atheism, immortality, and kindred topics prompted Coleridge to
suggest that a delightful and instructive essay might be written on
the Latitudinarian Party at Cambridge from the close of James I’s
rugn to the latter half of Charles II’s reign. In his note Coleridge
likewise characterized the principal members of the party according
to their philosophical affiliations.

Sotheby’s on April 12, 1907, sold one of the most interesting items
of Coleridge marginalia. When Southey published his Life of IV es-
Icx (2 vols., 1820), he gave a presentation copy to his gifted brother-
in-law. Coleridge reiciced in it and called it “mv darling book and
the favorite of my library.” During the ensuing years he enriched
the two volumes with copious annotations, many of which were
printed in later editions of the Life of Wesley. That all of the com¬
ments were not favorable may be inferred from the following sig¬
nificant note on the fly-leaf of the first volume: “Memento! It is
my desire and request that this work should be presented to its Donor
and Author, Robert Southey, after my Death. The substance and
character of the marginal annotations will abundantly prove the
absence of any such intention in my mind, at the time they were
written. But it will not be uninteresting to him to know that the one
or the other volume was the book more often in my hands than any
other in my ragged Book regiment.”

In conclusion we may refer to a volume that links the author of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the greatest of the Victorian
poets. Coleridge’s race was nearly run when Tennyson’s volumes
of 1830 and 1833 appeared. In his Table Talk (April 24, 1833),
he criticized Tennyson’s lack of understanding of English meter and
was probably referring to the 1833 volume, which had appeared in
December, 1832. Perhaps at some earlier time he had come across
a copy of Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which Tennyson had pre¬
sented to a lady with the inscription, “Jane Tonge, from her un¬
worthy friend the Author.” Coleridge asterisked the word “un¬
worthy” and added the somewhat pointed comment : “No imputation
is here cast on the judgement of the said Jane Tonge in the choice
of a friend : nor is there any lurking allusion to the well-known
adage, ‘Great minds will descend.’ Condescension is not descension.
— ‘the blue heaven bends over all.’ S. T. C.” This interesting vol¬
ume was sold at Sotheby’s on July 15, 1914.

In these brief notes on Coleridge’s marginalia enough has been

180 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

revealed to show why S. T. C. has so small a following and why
there is no general demand for a definitive edition of his complete
works. His own grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who died as
recently as 1920, did not even carry out his project to prepare an
adequate biography of his illustrious grandfather. Coleridge was
a man of the widest intellectual range. Few scholars of our own
day are equipped to follow him in all the fields of his interest. His
preparation for the synthesis of his scheme of philosophy was pro¬
found and comprehensive in the extreme, but as in the case of his
poetry, his performance was fragmentary, disjointed, and largely
ineffectual. Our age is one that has little time to meditate over
nuggets of wisdom to be found in random table-talk, literary ana, or
marginal commentary. Perhaps in that statement we may have the
basic reason for the bibliophile’s comparative neglect of the volumes
containing S. T. C.’s illuminating marginalia.

DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD, AND
THOMAS HOLCROFT

Paul C. Kitchen

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

THE autobiographical element in David Copper field has been
extensively emphasized. So much, indeed, has been said about
this aspect of the story that it requires some resolution to
accept the thought that Dickens’ imagination was furnished, although
in a slight degree, by what another man had written of himself, as
well as by the incidents and people of his own association. But
Forster, the intimate friend and authoritative biographer, says that
“too much has been assumed, from those revelations, of a full iden¬
tity of Dickens with his hero,” 1 and inclines one toward another
point of view. Reflecting upon this statement, one may admit that
Dickens found matter for the novel in the experience of another that
closely resembled his own, and that his imagination dwelling upon
the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft,2 found the latter’s revelations of
childhood germane to his purpose. Two questions naturally arise:
What did he find there ? And how did he adapt what he found to
the demands of the novel? The answers to these questions lie in
certain comparisons of the two books.

The Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft is a chronicle of the uses of
adversity. “By home,” he writes, “I mean an old house half in
ruins, about two miles on the north-east side of Rugeley, with a
kitchen-garden, paddock, and croft, which afforded some scanty
supplies to man and beast, when my father found it convenient, or
thought proper, to rest a little from his labours ; but to me this house
often became a den of misery. I was not yet nine years old, but I
had a variety of employments.” 3 How similar the situation here

1 Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. Ill, Chap. I.

* Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, London, 1814. Quotations in the present
paper are from a later edition, London, 1852.

’ Holcroft, p. 21.

1 82 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

pictured was to that in which Dickens found himself in childhood,
may be seen from his biography:

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such
an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little
drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough
on me — a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt,
bodily or mentally — to suggest that something might have been spared, as
certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends,
I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother
were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been
twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cam¬
bridge.1

Holcroft’s father was a tramping pedlar, while the elder Dickens
was a clerk in the Navy pay office; but in goods and possessions,
they were the terms of a neatly balanced equation.

Dickens was well aware of this likeness in type of experience.
In 1846, he wrote to Forster in reference to his own autobiography:
“Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die? There are some
things in it that would touch you very much, and that might go on
the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft’s.” 2 As boys,
moreover, Dickens and Holcroft were alike in spirit. Each suffered
because of the sordidness of his associations and environment ; each
sought an education, and expressed his longings in reading so far as
he was able; each was industrious, conscientious, and dependable;
and each succeeded, climbing out of the mire of his early surround¬
ings to a position not only of respectability but of eminence, the one
a playwright, the other a novelist.

Whatever intention Dickens may have had of setting down an
extended record of his life, was not, however, carried out, and he
chose to unite fact with fancy in the pages of David Copperfield.
I have seen the suggestion that the following paragraph from Hol¬
croft might be regarded as a description of Mr. Micawber : “Having
been bred to an employment for which he was very ill-fitted, both
from his physical and mental powers and propensities, the habit that
became most rooted in, and most fatal to my father, was a fickleness
of disposition, a thorough persuasion, after he had tried one means
of providing for himself and family for a certain time, that he had
discovered another far more profitable and secure. Steadiness of

‘Forster, Vol. I, Chap. II.

’Forster, Vol. II, Chap. XVI.

DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD, AND HOLCROFT 183

pursuit was a virtue at which he could never arrive; and I believe
few men in the kingdom had in the course of their lives been the
hucksters of so many small wares ; or more enterprising dealers in
articles of a half-penny value.” 1 Certainly if this were all, we
should have little of Mr. Micawber, and we know that the grandilo¬
quent flourish of speech which so endears him to the reader, came
from Dickens’ own father ; but there are here certain elements sug¬
gestive of Mr. Micawber ’s obvious faults. Might not his instability
have come partly from this source? And surely the following state¬
ment does well describe the Micawber character in the midst of un¬
toward circumstances: ‘‘How fortunate for me in this respect that
I had such a father 1 He was driven by extreme poverty, restless
anxiety, and a brain too prone to sanguine exjectation. into many
absurdities, which were but the harbingers of fresh misfortunes: but
be had as much integrity and honesty of heart as perhaps any man
in the kingdom, who had had no greater advantages.” 2 How similar
these sentiments are to those entertained by Dickens for his own
father is seen in the following sentences: ‘‘I know my father to be
as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world.
Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his wife, or chil¬
dren, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise.” 3
Two quotations from the novel will show the development of the
idea the germ of which is contained in the above paragraph from
the Memoirs: “ ‘You find us, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, with
one eye on Traddles, ‘at present established, on what may be desig¬
nated as a small and unassuming scale ; but, you are aware that I
have, in the course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and con¬
quered obstacles. You are no stranger to the fact, that there have
been periods of my life, when it has been requisite that I should
pause, until certain expected events should turn up ; when it has been
necessary that I should fall back, before making what I trust I shall
not be accused of presumption in terming — a spring. The present is
one of those momentous stages in the life of man. You find me,
fallen back, for a spring; and I have every reason to believe that a
vigorous leap will shortly be the result.’ ” 4 And a little later on we
encounter the statement: “I am at present, my dear Copperfield,

1 Holcroft. p. 19.

3 Holcroft, p. 15; cf. Holcroft, Chap. XVI: "I loved my father,” etc.

* Forster, Vol. I, Chap. I.

* David Copperfield, Chap. XXVII.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

184

engaged in the sale of corn upon commission. It is not an avocation
of a remunerative description — in other words, it does not pay — and
some temporary embarrassments of a pecuniary nature have been the
consequence. I am, however, delighted to add that I have now an
immediate prospect of something turning up (I am not at liberty to
say in what direction), which I trust will enable me to provide, per¬
manently, both for myself and for your friend Traddles, in whom
I have an unaffected interest.” 1 Surely if Mr. Micawber was
Dickens’ father he has much in common with the elder Holcroft.

That both Dickens and Holcroft retained certain like convictions
in reference to childhood is suggested in the following passages.
How far this expression of David Copperfield reflects the sentiment
of his creator, might be determined by other references of Dickens
to the subject; the similarity to the Memoirs is immediately apparent.
“Most persons, I believe, retain through life a few strong impressions
of very early childhood. I have a recollection of being played with
by my parents, when very young, and of the extreme pleasure it gave
me.” 2 And David Copperfield, referring to his earliest recollections,
said:

I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to
my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily
from the one to the other. I have an impression on my mind which I cannot
distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of Peggotty’s fore-finger
as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework,
like a pocket nutmeg grater.

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go
farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the
power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful
for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are
remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost
the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such
men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being

pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their child¬
hood.

But by far the most striking resemblance between the story of
David Copperfield and Holcroft’s brief autobiography lies in the
episode, humorous, yet not lacking in pathos, of the stolen dinner.
To this incident in the Memoirs Dickens has added dialogue, substi-

1 Ibid., Chap. XXVII.

* Holcroft, p. 7.

* David Copperfield, Chap. II.

DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD, AND HOLCROFT 185

tilting for the two Irishmen the waiter altogether a Dickens’ creation.
The scene in David Copperfield is the work of a unique genius, but
no one can doubt that it is fundamentally the same as that in the
earlier book. Here is the episode complete in each case. Holcroft
thus describes his adventure:

My father broke up his little establishment near Rugeley, and took me with
him into Cheshire, but left me at a village two or three miles from Haslem,
where I was entrusted to the care of an old woman, who kept a lodging-
house, and whom, from the whole t her appearance, as well as her kindness
to me, I always remembered with respect. On the evening of my arrival,
but later, tw travelling Irishmen came in, and were admitted as lodgers.
My father had bargained with the old woman, that she was to provide for
me : travellers, of course, who come in at sunset, and depart at day-break, pro¬
vide for themselves, or are obliged to be satisfied with what such barren
abodes can -upply. The Irishmen had provided a halfpenny roll between
them : what they might have mon I do not know. But my good old dame
they noticed to be mashing up a \ ler.tiful supper of new milk anti potatoes for
me, a dish in which their hearts delighted. Whether it was contrivance, acci¬
dent, or according to rule, I cannot say; we did not, however, sup in the pres¬
ence of the old woman, but in the room in which we all three slept. No
sooner were we here, and I had begun in imagination to de\our my delicate
mashed potatoes, than the Irishmen came up to me, patted my cheeks, told me
what a pretty little boy I was, asked my name, inquired who took care of me,
and to what country I was going; and swore by the holy father they never in
all their lives saw so sweet a looking boy, and so compliant and good-
tempered. 'Do now,’’ said one of them, “let me taste of your mashed pota¬
toes.” “Aye, and me too,” said the other — “I zmrratid you don’t much care
about them! We, now, are a dale more used to them in Ireland: I’m sure
you'll be very glad to make an exchange. Here now, here is a very fine half¬
penny roll, which is very nice ating, and which, to be sure, we bought for our
own supper. To be sure, we should be fond enough of it, but we don’t care
about trifles ; and as we have been used to ate potatoes all the days of our
lives, and you English all like bread, why if you plase, my sweet compliable
fillow, we will just make a little bit of a swap, and so we shall all ate our
suppers heartily.” The action followed the word; they took my potatoes, and
gave me the dry roll : while I, totally disconcerted, and not a little overawed
by the wildness of my fellow-lodgers’ looks, the strangeness of their brogue,
their red whiskers, dark beards, carroty wigs, and sparkling black eyes, said
not a word, but quietly submitted, though I thoroughly regretted the dainty
supper I had lost, and saw them devour it with an aching heart.1

And David Copperfield in this fashion sets forth the circumstances
in which he was placed and reveals his embai rassment :

Holcroft, p. 5.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

1 86

It was a large long room with some large maps in it. I doubt if I could
have felt much stranger if the maps had been real foreign countries, and I cast
away in the middle of them. I felt it was taking a liberty to sit down, with
my cap in my hand, on the corner of the chair nearest the door; and when
the waiter laid a cloth on purpose for me, and put a set of castors on it, I
think I must have turned red all over with modesty.

He brought me some chops, and vegetables, and took the covers off in such
a bouncing manner that I was afraid I must have given him some offence.
But he greatly relieved my mind by putting a chair for me at the table, and
saying, very affable, “Now, six-foot! come on!”

I thanked him, and took my seat at the board; but found it extremely diffi¬
cult to handle my knife and fork with anything like dexterity, or to avoid
splashing myself with the gravy, while he was standing opposite, staring so
hard, and making me blush in the most dreadful manner every time I caught
his eye. After watching me into the second chop, he said :

“There’s half a pint of ale for you. Will you have it now?”

I thanked him and said “Yes.” Upon which he poured it out of a jug into
a large tumbler, and held it up against the light, and made it look beautiful.

“My eye!” he said. “It seems a good deal, don’t it?”

“It does seem a good deal,” I answered with a smile. For it was quite
delightful to me to find him so pleasant. He was a twinkling-eyed, pimple¬
faced man, with his hair standing upright all over his head ; and as he stood
with one arm a-kimbo, holding up the glass to the light with the other hand,
he looked quite friendly.

“There was a gentleman here, yesterday,” he said— “a stout gentleman, by
the name of Topsawyer — perhaps you know him?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think - ”

“In breeches and gaiters, broad-brimmed hat, grey coat, speckled choker,”
said the waiter.

“No,” I said bashfully, “I haven’t the pleasure - ”

"He came in here,” said the waiter, looking at the light through the tumbler,
ordered a glass of this ale — would order it — I told him not — drank it, and
fell dead. It was too old for him. It oughtn’t to be drawn; that’s the fact.”

I was very much shocked to hear of this melancholy accident, and said I
thought I had better have some water.

“Why, you see,” said the waiter, still looking at the light through the
tumbler, with one of his eyes shut up, “our people don’t like things being
ordered and left. It offends ’em. But Til drink it, if you like. I’m used
to it, and use is everything. I don’t think it’ll hurt me, if I throw my head
back, and take it off quick. Shall I?”

I replied that he would much oblige me by drinking it, if he thought he
could do it safely, but by no means otherwise. When he did throw his head
back, and take it off quick, I had a horrible fear, I confess, of seeing him
meet the fate of the lamented Mr. Topsawyer, and fall lifeless on the carpet.

But it didn’t hurt him. On the contrary, I thought he seemed the fresher
for it.

DICKENS, DAVID C0PPERF1ELD, AND HOLCROFT 187

“What have we got here?” he said, putting a fork into my dish. “Not
chops ?”

“Chops,” I said.

“Lord bless my soul !” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know they were chops.
Why, a chop’s the very thing to take off the bad effects of that beer ! Ain’t
it lucky?”

So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in the other, and
ate away with a very good appetite, to my extreme satisfaction. He after¬
wards took another chop, and another potato ; and after that another chop and
another potato. When he had done, he brought me a pudding, and having set
it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some
moments.

“How’s the pie?” he said, rousing himself.

“It's a pudding,” I made answer.

“Pudding!” he exclaimed. “Why, bless me. so it is! What!” looking at
it nearer. “You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding!”

‘Yes, it is indeed.”

“Why, a batter-pudding,” he said, taking up a tablespoon, “is my favourite
pudding! Ain’t it lucky? Come on. little ’un, and let’s see who'll get most.”

The waiter certainly got most. He entreated me more than once to come
in and win, but what with his tablespoon to my tea-spoon, his despatch to
my despatch, and his appetite to my appetite, I was left far behind at the
first mouthful, and had no chance with him. I never saw anyone enjoy a
pudding so much, I think; and he laughed, when it was all gone, as if his
enjoyment of it lasted still.1

With this episode in mind one does not find it hard to conceive
that when Dickens referred to Holcroft in the letter of 1846 to
Forster mentioned above, he was retaining the Memoirs, perhaps
unconsciously, in his thought for imaginative use. He endowed
whatever in the Holcroft biography may have appealed to him, with
his own colors — inimitable, to use his own word — and made it by his
touch indubitably, immortally his own. The process, reduced here
to microscopical proportions, is similar to that by which Shakespeare
created Romeo and Juliet out of The Tragicall Hist or ye of an ob¬
scure poet by the name of Brooke.

Forster warns us against too literal an autobiographical reading
of Daznd Copperficld. Is it not possible that Dickens, desiring to
avoid too faithful a disclosure of his childhood, stepped deliberately
out of his own experience in the employment of this incident of the
dinner? Surely there was enough of heart-reaching adventure in
his own early boyhood, but from Dickens’ feeling about his early

1 Daznd Copperfield, Chap. V.

1 88 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

poverty and, as it seemed to him, menial employment and degrading
companions,1 one may conclude that he shrank from a too complete
revelation in the novel. But probably Dickens simply found in the
Memoirs material that struck his fancy and appeared to him suitable
for use in the development of his main purpose. The reason lies,
of course, in the odd similarity of Holcroft’s early life and associa¬
tions to his own. We know that Dickens read the Memoirs; that he
regarded his own experiences as similar in point of view of hardships
to those undergone by Holcroft; what more natural than that he
should have turned to the adventures of another whose life so closely
resembled his own in weaving the life story of his “favorite child,”
David Copperfield ?

‘Forster, Vol. I, Chap. II: “No words can express the secret agony of
my soul as I sunk into this companionship; . . . The deep remembrance of
the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless ; of the shame I felt in
my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by
day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy
and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back
any more; cannot be written.” Cf. Holcroft: Chap. XVII. “I despised my
companions for the grossness of their ideas, and the total absence of every
pursuit in which the mind appeared to have any share. It was even with
sneers of contempt that they saw me intent on acquiring some small portion
of knowledge: so that I was far from having any prompter, either as a friend
or a rival. As far as I was concerned with horses, I was pleased ; but I saw
scarcely a biped, John Watson excepted, in whom I could find any thing to
admire.”

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS EDUCATIONAL

TREATISES

George Wm, McClelland
Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

“But that we ever remember, that they are children, God’s children, heires
of his Kingdome; wee are to nurture them onely vnder him, to traine them vp
for him, and for his Church; nor to correct nature, but vice; to do all to the
end to make them men.”

A LITTLE more than three centuries ago the writer of these
words, a Puritan schoolmaster by the name of John Brinsley,
was endeavoring to glorify God by a faithful performance of
his duties as master of the grammar school at Ashbv-de-la-Zouch in
Leicestershire. When he was elected to the position in 1601 the
school was in its thirty-fifth year and had been served by many school¬
masters, including Joseph Hall, a native son, who was afterwards to
become famous as Bishop of Exeter.1 But none of them, we judge,
had been more zealous than was Brinsley in serving to instruct youth
“in good morals, learning, knowledge, and virtue” — the avowed pur¬
pose of the founders.2

Brinsley was progressive in spirit and he came to see for himself
a wider field than a single parish. As the years of experience
brought him face to face with the problems of instruction, he en¬
deavored to solve them, not merely for his own benefit but for the
improvement of all British schools similar to his own. In spite of
the confining routine in the Ashby school he found time to make
inquiry of colleagues in London and elsewhere and to put their
suggestions to the test, using his own classroom as an experimental
laboratory. After years of educational research he came to such a
positive conviction that the adoption of more intelligent methods of
imparting information would effect a needed reform in the grammar

1 Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, I, 794.

* Henry, Earl of Huntington, Lord Hastings of Loughborough, Robert
Brookesby, Nicholas Ashbye, and Robert Baynbrig.

180

190 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

schools that he published the truth as he had found it in a series of
treatises and textbooks. His ambition was frankly given to the
world when in 1622 he stated as his aim and hope “that all sorts for
whom they haue been written, may reape some benefit by them, so
long as schooles or learning shall remaine.” 1

The influence of any teacher of strong personality upon the
thought that molds men’s lives is, of course, quite incapable of
measurement. It is all the more impossible by any sort of inves¬
tigation to look back across the intervening centuries and estimate
how far Brinsley’s ideal attained to realization. Yet we can feel
sure that such a kindly, intelligent, and forceful instructor as his
books show him to have been must have left an impression upon the
boys who studied under him at Ashby and wherever else he taught,
and his practical suggestions must have been invaluable to many a
country schoolmaster whose intentions were better than the training
he had undergone.

That he was influential in his day and for several decades there¬
after is proved by the demand for many editions of his books down
to and even past the Restoration. He is referred to frequently as
an authority by Hoole (1660), who joins his name with Ascham’s
as an exponent of double translation, cites his Golden Rule of Con¬
struing as that of the “industrious Mr. Brinsley,” and adds, “Mr.
Brinsley seemeth to have made a Discovery of a more perfect method,
than was in his time used, or is yet generally received.” 2

A writer who neither made pretensions to literary ability nor
enunciated broad educational principles could not have expected to
retain what temporary fame he enjoyed during his later years.
Brinsley focused his attention upon the more minute matters of class¬
room instruction. Adopting without serious question the limited
curriculum that had become more or less standardized in the grammar
schools of the early seventeenth century, he aimed to disseminate a
more intelligent and thus more productive method of teaching the few
subjects that such a course of study provided. Practical suggestions,
if they prove of value, are readily passed on from educator to edu¬
cator without any tag of authorship. Furthermore, imitation of a
successful teacher is quite as apt to be unconscious as conscious, and
as the years passed there were undoubtedly many schoolmasters who

, for Our Grammar Schooles, p. 18.

A New Discovery (Bardeen reprint), pp. 183, 129, 325.

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES 191

were practising the Brinsley method in total ignorance that such a
great teacher had taught, written, and passed on. It is therefore not
surprising that the present incumbent at Ashby when asked for in¬
formation about his remote predecessor wrote frankly, “I must con¬
fess that I never heard of him.” 1

It has remained for recent scientific educators to rediscover John
Brinsley and appreciate the historical significance of his writings.
As early as 1868 Quick, in speaking of Brinsley’s most interesting
books, commented, “The first of these (i. e., the Ludus Literarius )
when reprinted, as it is sure to be, will always secure for its author
the notice and the gratitude of the students of the history of our
education.” 2 The histories have given Brinsley passing notice,
although the references are limited almost exclusively to his most
famous treatise.3 Recent investigators into certain phases of gram¬
mar-school instruction have summed up and cited passages from the
Ludus as illustrations of the prevailing practice of the day,4 but
Quick’s prophecy concerning republication has not yet been fulfilled.
Mr. Foster Watson, who has contributed so much that sheds light
upon the books used in the Elizabethan grammar schools and the
means employed in teaching them, is another who has shown cause
for making accessible the books of this shrewd preacher and prac¬
titioner who was an important educator of his day: “I especially
plead for the books of John Brinsley and Charles Hoole. The names
may be but little known to the general public. Yet for an account of
the best educational procedure of their times, and for educational
bibliography, there are surely no superior works in English history.” B
Brinsley is thus slowly coming into his own but in a way that he
would scarcely have foreseen. His reputation among his contempo¬
raries rested upon the novelty of his schemes for improving the
quality of teaching, but whatever permanent fame he is to enjoy
will depend upon his incidental reflection of the conditions that pre¬
vailed at the time. He revealed the ills in order to propose the
remedy ; we, impressed though we may be by the insight and excellent
judgment revealed in his suggestions, find our chief interest in the

‘Letter dated April 30, 1916, from Mr. C. Elliott, Head Master.

1 Educational Reformers, p. 200.

* E. g. Mark, Educational Theories in England.

* Stowe, English Grammar Schools in the Reign of Elizabeth; Adamson,
Pioneers of Modern Education, pp. 20-21 ; Brown, The Making of Our Middle
Schools; Watson, English Grammar Schools.

5 Educational Review, London, June, 1899.

192

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

diagnosis. In that lay his lasting contribution to the profession that
he esteemed so highly.

The question of fame, however, would not have disturbed John
Brinsley. He was a man of whom Wordsworth would have ap¬
proved. A teacher who devoted much time “to high thinking,” he
regarded duty as a blessed opportunity and the means of securing
the highest happiness. He was not a man to be concerned “whether
praise of him must walk the earth forever.”

This characterization of the man is written between the lines of
his books. He shows himself as a kindly gentleman, most generous
in recognizing the well-intended efforts of others, yet deliberately
austere and severe on occasion and dogmatic when the results of his
experience have led him to positive beliefs. He had been too close
to the actual, discouraging facts to be idealistic in his view of gram¬
mar-school conditions, and he knew that the best of intentions may
procure ill results ; yet he was quietly and steadfastly optimistic. A
general improvement in education seemed to him quite feasible, yet
every worker must get all possible light upon his task, must be
inspired by the highest motives, and then work diligently at his
portion of labor. Not allowing himself to yield to anger (except to
righteous indignation as he meditated upon the Papists), he could
feel and express the most burning moral passion for his God, for
the Church, and for the education which he felt to be in the service
of both.

As yet but few facts of his life story have come to light. The
date of his birth is unknown but may be placed c. 156s. He went
up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in March, 1580-1, and as he
recommends fifteen as the minimum age for university matriculates,
it is fair to assume that his own experience had been similar. Brins¬
ley was the type of conscientious man who would be apt to mention
any apparent contradiction between his preachments and his actual
practice. His name appears as Bringley when he first matriculated
as sizar at Christ’s, whereas he is recorded in the University Register
as Brmley. Later he was registered as scholar under the name of
Brinsley, and in 1584-5 the degree of A.B. was bestowed upon John
Brynsley. The M.A. followed in 1588.1

Uni,IeXmof°C,mbrii£'d ^ R ^.rary of .h.

193

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

Almost nothing is known of his whereabouts between 1588 and
his appointment to the school at Ashby -de-la-Zouch in 1601. Prob¬
ably he had been teaching elsewhere during the interval, for in 1621
he told the educational world that he had had “much and long
experience of diverse places” and also referred to the beginning of
his “Schoole labours” as “now aboue 30 years ago.” From this same
treatise we learn that he “had from the beginning for sundry years
the aduice and direction” of Master John Ireton of Kegworth in
Leicestershire, “who was well knowne to be inferiour to few in all
excellent learning, and euen in this kinde (i. e., teaching) among
others.” Elsewhere Brinsley refers to Ireton as “a worthy learned
man whom Cambridge in his time much reuerenced, who hauing
laboured many yeares with litle fruite, amongst a blinde, and super¬
stitious people, was wont much to lament, that he was enforced to
labour in a barren soyle where salt had bene sowen : whence he vsed
to affirme that the chiefe hope of Gods church for all such pleaces so
nuzled vp in rudeness and superstition, was to come out of our
Grammar schooles.” 1

Evidently Ireton was the clergyman of the parish and as there was
no established grammar school in the village it is safe to conjecture
that Brinsley kept a private school. From the first, at any rate, he
was led to see the importance of the relation of the schools to the
church.

However many “diuerse places” he may have tarried in en route,
he was at Ashby by 1601. He had previously married the sister of
Joseph Hall, later Bishop of Exeter and of Norwich, who had
already begun to bring fame to his native village. Possibly Hall’s
influence was responsible for the appointment. The schoolmaster’s
son and namesake, whose fame as an ardent Puritan preacher was
to eclipse that of the father, had been born in 1600.2

The Ludus Literarius (1612) was published during Brinsley’s
headmastership at Ashby, so that from this his greatest work we can
construct the picture of his service to the school. But fortunately
we have the testimony of one of his scholars to bear out the truth
of the master’s self-revelations, in the Autobiography of William
Lilly, the astrologer.

1 Consolidation, pp. II, 15, 28, 37.

2 Allibone confuses the two and credits the son with his father’s educa¬
tional publications.

194 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

My mother intending I should be a scholar from my infancy, seeing my
father’s backslidings in the world, and no hopes by plain husbandry to recruit
a decayed estate: therefore upon Trinity Tuesday, 1613, my father had me
to Ashby de la Zouch, to be instructed by one Mr. John Brinsley; one, in
those times, of great abilities for instruction of youth in the Latin and
Greek tongues; he was very severe in his life and conversation, and did
breed up many scholars for the universities : in religion he was a strict
puritan, not conformable wholly to the ceremonies of the Church of Eng¬
land. In this town of Ashby de la Zouch for many years together, Mr.
Arthur Hildersham exercised his ministry at my being there; and all the
while I continued at Ashby, he was silenced ... an excellent textuary, of
exemplary life, pleasant in discourse ... a strong enemy to the Browmsts,
and dissented not from the Church of England in any article of faith, but
only about wearing the surplice, baptizing with the cross, and kneeling at
the sacrament; most of the people in the town were directed by his judgment,
and so continued, and yet do continue presbyterianly affected. . . .

The several authors I there learned were these, viz. Sententiae Pueriles,
Cato, Corderius, .Esop’s Fables, Tully’s Offices, Ovid de Tristibus, lastly,
Virgil, then Horace; as also Camden’s Greek Grammar, Theognis and
Homer’s Iliads: I was only entered into Udall’s Hebrew Grammar; he
never taught Logick, but often would say it was fit to be learned in the
universities.

In the eighteenth year of my age my master Brinsley was enforced from
keeping school, being persecuted by the Bishop’s officers, he came to London,
and then lectured in London, where he afterwards died. I also was en¬
forced to leave school. . . .

For the two last years of my being at school, I was of the highest form
in the school, and chiefest of that form; I could then speak Latin as well as
English; could make extempore verses upon any theme; all kinds of verses,
Hexameter, Pentameter, Phalevciacks, Iambicks, Sapphicks, &c. If any
minister came to examine us, I was brought forth against him, nor would I
argue with him unless in the Latin tongue, which I found few of them
could well speak without breaking Priscian’s head, which, if once they did,
I would complain to my master, Non bene intelligit linguam Latinam, nec
prorsus loquitus. In the derivation of words, I found most of them defec¬
tive, nor indeed were any of them good grammarians : all and every of those
scholars who were of my form and standing, went to Cambridge and proved
excellent divines, only poor I, William Lilly, was not so happy.1

We know that Brinsley’s successor, a Mr. Watson, came to Ashby-
de-la-Zouch in 1618. 2 In spite of the majority sentiment of the
community which leaned toward Puritanism there was a minority
to whom the Reformation sentiment was less congenial.3 Hilder-

1 Lilly, Autobiography, pp. 5-8.

* Carlisle, I, 794.

Victoria County Histories, Leicestershire, I, 373.

i95

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

sham, of whom Lilly wrote, was suspended from preaching by the
High Commission Court in June, 1590, for six months; by Bishop
Neile in 161 1 for more than ten years. This last suspension kept him
silent during the years 1613-18 that Lilly spent under Brinsley’s
instruction. That Brinsley brought up his scholars to take a stand
against the use of the cross in baptism and against the order for
kneeling at communion,1 is sufficient explanation for his having been
deprived of his position as head of the grammar school. It is also
not unlikely that he had drawn attention to himself by his uncom¬
promising statement in the first two parts of The True Watch and
Rule of Life, religious booklets which had reached their seventh
edition by 1615. At any rate “he was fain to retire to London.” 2
The authentic biography of Brinsley seems to close at this point.
We are told that he taught at Great Yarmouth and was a minister
there,3 but whether before or after leaving Ashby is not stated. He
continued active in publication after reaching London up to 1624,
when he brought out the fourth part of The True Watch. As his
educational and religious writings ceased then while there was still
great demand for them, it may be inferred that he died at approxi¬
mately the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

As an educational writer, John Brinsley was no rash, impetuous
theorist. When he first appeared before the public in print (1612)
he had been away from Cambridge for twenty-four years, teaching
presumably all of that time. We know, at least, that for eleven years
he had been in charge of the school at Ashby, and had acquired the
reputation of being a successful teacher. Those had been years of
experimentation in his search to find methods of imparting informa¬
tion and of training youthful minds that would be “more plaine and
profitable.” He had made the acquaintance of some of the most
illustrious men in his profession, or at least had managed to get into
touch with the ideas that governed their teaching. We have his own
word for it that he had gone about his research intelligently by
inquiring of the universities which schools were sending up the best
prepared students and following up this information by seeking to
find out what methods were being used by the masters of those
schools.

'Ibid., p. 376.

* Cambridge History of English Literature, VII, 380.

* Dictionary of National Biography.

196 schelling anniversary papers

His next step was to experiment in his own school with the sug¬
gestions that he had received from them. Brinsley s books thus ac¬
quire greater weight as we consider that he was not occupied during
all these years in lecturing upon method to teachers or future teachers
but was diligently testing ways and means among the very children
whose progress they were intended to further. To acquire a better
perspective he also endeavored to get the benefit of the judgment
“of all the learned” with whom he had the opportunity of conferring
about the problems of the classroom. He went even further than
this. He induced some of “the best authorise, learning, and judge¬
ment” to make yearly trials of these schemes, that they might report
in what those methods were defective and give encouragement when¬
ever their opinion was favorable.1

With all our modern conceptions of scientific research along peda¬
gogical lines we cannot but feel respect for the conscientiousness
with which this schoolmaster of three centuries ago sought to advance
the work of the grammar schools. When we consider the long
hours he spent daily in the classroom 2 and the difficulties in his way
when he wished to get into touch with what was being done else¬
where, his spirit becomes the more admirable. He showed no haste
but moved steadily toward a feeling of certainty before he judged
himself ready to put his opinions in printed form so that they might
be of service to others. Thus, when in 1612 the press of Thomas
Mann brought forward his longest work, the Ludus Litcrarius, his
catechism on Latin grammar, and two of his so-called “grammatical
translations,” the weight of experience lay behind them. Bishop
Hall, commending the most important of these works in a preface,
reminded the readers : “Neither are these directions of meere specu¬
lation; whose promises are commonly as large, as the perform¬
ance defective; but such as (for the most part) to the knowledge
of myselfe, and many abler Judges, haue beene, & are daily
answered in his experience, and practice, with more than Vsuall
successe.”

By this time Brinsley had mapped out and was working hard at
his life-occupation. He had become persuaded that he could not
labor more acceptably in anie earthly thing, or whereby a greater

1 Consolation, pp. 22 ff

LiiraZ, Ct XXjT” 5:3° P' is ,he sch°o1 hE

Ludus

197

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

benefite might redound both to Church and Commonwealth, and in
some sort to euery soule, then in searching out, and setting forth to
the view of all, the shortest, surest, and most easie entrance, to all
good learning, and how with certaine hope of good successe all may
proceed therein.” 1 His aim was, then, to be practical rather than
theoretical, to give minute suggestions that would be of definite help
in classroom instruction, not “great matters.” He made no preten¬
sions to literary skill “in a lofty kind of verse or prose” ; for, he adds,
“this I leaue to our worthy renowned schooles of Westminster,
Eaton, Winchester, and the rest both in London & elsewhere, and
to our Schoolemaisters of chiefe fame, whose breeding & imployment
in schooles hath bin accordingly.” These men and their success he
did not envy but he had a strong desire that he might assist others “to
partake of the like in their kind.” 2

It was upon the “meaner and ruder schools” that he was con¬
centrating his attention, though he had also in mind those men who
have to substitute personally directed education for the school train¬
ing that they missed when they were younger. In 1622, when pub¬
lishing his Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles , he summarized
his specific aims as follows: (a) to inspire others to make similar
experiments for the perfection of method; (b) to induce his col¬
leagues to communicate the results of their own efforts; (c) to make
known the most profitable books and helps “which God hath to this
end prouided, both for Maisters and Scholars” ; (d) to help all teach¬
ers who are toiling without fruit; and (e) to effect “almost double
sound learning, to that which hath bene in manie rude places.3
There is, furthermore, a direct frankness that frees him from any
charge of undue self-esteem in the words with which he discloses
to the reader his attitude in the Ludus Literarius: “I seeke not my
selfe: if I may doe some little seruice to God and my Country, I shall
haue enough. I oppose my selfe to none. Shew my ouersight in
loue, and I will amend it. I prescribe to none: no, not the meanest;
but onely desire to learn of all the learned, to helpe the unlearned.
In the worke I take nothing to my selfe, but the wants. What I
receiued of others, I receiued to this end; after fuil triall made of
them, to publish them for the common good.”

1 Consolation, p. 1.

* Ibid., p. 25.

’ Consolation, pp. 29, 30.

I98 schelling anniversary papers

The Ludus Litcrarius 1 was not only the first but his most sig¬
nificant publication. The didactic purpose made it seem to him
advisable to present his discussion of all sorts and conditions of pro -
lems to be met by the grammar-school teachers in the form of a col¬
loquy. It covers 312 pages of actual dialogue in addition to the
prefatory matter and the recapitulation with which the author brings
his book to an end; and is fitted throughout with marginal sum-

maries. ,

There are two speakers, representative of two types of the teacher,

yet so earnestly realized by their creator that they stand forth as
clearly defined individualities. Spoudeus 2 has been long in the serv¬
ice, earnest, diligent, painstaking, but moving as one in the dark. His
labors have brought him little by way of compensation ; his harvest
has been mainly antagonistic criticism from parents, a hostile rebel¬
lious attitude from the children, and a sense of his own failure. His
spirit has been crushed and, without a shred of self-confidence, he is
willing to accept in deep humility any suggestion whatever that is
offered to him. He is made the spokesman for the class of broken-
spirited masters, whose work has been assiduous but unintelligent.
They have merely followed the traditional methods employed by the
schools of their time without any hope of escaping the drudgery.
Their scholars dislike learning, become recalcitrant, and are beaten, —
but to what avail?

Hearing that his friend Philoponus has succeeded where he has
failed, Spoudeus seeks him out at his “poore house” to talk matters
over. He is greeted cordially by his host, who well remembers the
man with whom he had lived at college twenty years before. He
recognizes him more by his voice, however, than by his appearance,
so prematurely old has Spoudeus been made by his cares and

‘The full title reads: Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole;
shewing how to proceede from the first entrance into learning to the highest
perfection required in the Grammar Schooles, with ease, certainty and de¬
light both to Masters and Schoilers ; onely according to our common Gram¬
mar and ordinary Classicall Authours : begun to be sought out at the de¬
sire of some worthy fauorers of learning, by searching the experiments of
sundry most profitable Schoole-masters and other learned, and confirmed
by tryall: intended for the helping of the younger sort of Teachers, and of
all Schoilers, with all other desirous of learning : for the perpetuall benefit
of Church and Common-wealth. It offered itselfe to all to whom it may doe
good, or of whom it may receiue good to bring it towards perfection.

’Incorrectly given as Spondeus in Adamson, Pioneers of Modern
Education.

199

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

struggles. Philoponus is only too willing to chat with him but, with
the logical mind of the pedagogue, thinks it will be most advantageous
to take up the work of the classroom point by point from “the first
entrance into learning,” and dispose of each subject systematically.
This he proceeds to do. As a rule, the topics are suggested by the
inquiring visitor, but when Spoudeus becomes impatient to get ahead
to the teaching of Latin, his guide has to remind him that the ele¬
mentary course must first be treated thoroughly. Philoponus has
other auditors in mind besides the one who is listening in his imme¬
diate presence.

Beginning with a discussion of the proper age for starting chil¬
dren at their lessons, and proceeding through the program of elemen¬
tary training in reading and writing the vernacular, the sympathetic
adviser spends much of his time and attention upon what is after all
his subject of special interest, the teaching of Latin grammar, litera¬
ture, and composition, with the help of the catechism for Latin
grammar and the grammatical translations which he himself has
prepared for simplifying the tasks of the grammar school teacher.
He has also instructions to give concerning other subjects in the
curriculum, and guidance for such important matters of school
organization as the wise choosing of masters, punishments, and the
most advantageous ways of examining students to determine results.
Underlying all his remarks is an insistence upon keeping the emphasis
upon the religious import of learning.

The dialogue, it is true, suffers at times, for the model teacher
delivers lectures that seem too systematically planned to be impromptu
utterances. But though the pedagogical thus subordinates the dra¬
matic we are always conscious of the two friends of former years.
Spoudeus speaks for what is being done and humbly describes how
he has failed, while Philoponus, ready with new suggestions, never
wearies of going over and over the same ground in order that light
may dawn through the darkness that has surrounded his long-suffer¬
ing colleague. Philoponus is Brinsley, — of that there can be no
doubt. He stands revealed as a practical man with a forward look,
one who is neither content with the education of his day nor so
idealistic that he is disheartened as he contemplates its shortcomings.
With a quiet optimism resulting from his firm conviction that an
intelligent aim and resourcefulness will turn failure into success, he

200

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

focuses his attention not upon the darkness of the day but upon the
dawn of a to-morrow. He is confident but not conceited, humble but
dignified withal, and if he is somewhat empirical in his utterances
it is an attitude which gives one confidence in the efficacy of his
theories.

Perhaps the most conspicuous quality of Brinsley, as Philoponus
discloses him, is his altruism. Bishop Hall, who as his brother-in-law
must have been qualified to speak, paid tribute to him in his prefatory
commendation as one “of those spirits, which cannot ingrosse good
experiments to their priuate aduantage, which had rather do then
haue good : who can be content to cast at once into the common Bank
of the world, what the studious obseruation, inquisition, reading,
practice of many yeres haue inriched them withall — Behold here,
not feete, but wings, offered to vs.”

A second edition of the Ludus Literarius in full appeared in 1627,
copies of which are now more readily accessible than those of the
earlier issue. Notwithstanding the interval of fifteen years, the only
changes seem to have been the correction of obvious typographical
errors and a slight modernization in the spelling. There is an inter¬
esting bit of evidence that the printer (in this case Felix Kyngston)
followed one of the earlier copies in having the type set up. Near
the end of the 1612 edition there appears an announcement that two
of Mr. Brinsley s grammatical translations. Sent entice Pueriles and
Cato , will be issued shortly ; and following the prefatory matter
(which was evidently set up last) is put an advertisement by the
printer as follows: “Courteous Reader, whereas in the later end of
this Book it is signified in what forwardness the Author’s transla¬
tions of Sent entice Pueriles and Cato are ; take notice also that his
booke entituled, The Poasing of the Accidence , is since come into my
hands, and likely to come forth at the same time with Cato.”

In a copy of the 1627 edition now in the University of Pennsyl¬
vania library, this printer’s notice is repeated, although the books
mentioned had been before the public for fifteen years. Either the
author or the printer had taken care to remove one of the notices
but had faded to strike out the other; in any case there was evidently

no attempt at revision. Even the pagination is almost identical in
both editions.

Some five years before this second publication of his important
treatise, Brinsley had brought out a little book which he called, A

201

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

Consolation for our Grammar Schooles } As the full title indicates,
this work was intended to quicken interest in learning among the
schools in the parts of the Kingdom other than England and Scot¬
land. It was dedicated to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, The Lord
President and Lord Lieutenant of Wales, the Governors “of the lies
of Gernsey and Iernsey,” and to the Treasurer, Council, and Com¬
pany “for Virginia, and of the Sommer Islands.”

The references to its connection with the Ludus Literarius or
The Grammar Schoole are somewhat confusing. On the very last
page Brinsley makes the statement: “for attaining all those parts of
learning mentioned in the Contents, see the Booke called Ludus
Literarius, or the Grammar-schoole in this second Edition : where, in
a familiar Dialogue betweene two Schoolemaisters all these things are
fully discussed and set foorth, and yet the booke in many things
abridged, and made lesse then before.” This reference to a second
edition gains added weight from the examiners’ censure which was
added to the Consolation under date of March 16, 1620. This state¬
ment, signed by James Ussher, Professor of Divinity in the Univer¬
sity of Dublin, and Daniel Featly, D.D., Chaplain to his Grace of
Canterbury, alludes to the commendation by Bishop Hall which ac¬
companied the Ludus at its first publishing and then adds : “yet now
that it is to come foorth the second time, much more compleate and
perfect after so much long trauell and experience, we haue hereupon
made new and further triall accordingly.”

The Consolation for Our Grammar Schools, in which these ref¬
erences were made, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on the
16th of November 1621, 2 and published the following year. It was
evidently intended as a handbook to accompany and stimulate interest
in the earlier treatise which, as we have seen, gives Brinsley’s educa¬
tional opinion in detail. The natural inference would be that a new
edition of the Ludus was about to appear, but investigation has failed

'A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles: or, A faithful and most
comfortable incouragement, for laying of a sure foundation of all good
Learning in our Schooles, and for prosperous building thereup. More spe¬
cially for all those of the inferiour sort, and all ruder countries and places;
namely, for Ireland, Wales Virginia, with the Sommer Hands, and for their
more speedie attaining of our English tongue by the same labour, that all
may speak one and the same Language. And withall, for the helping of
all such as are desirous speedilie to recouer that which they had formcrlie
got in the Grammar Schooles; and to proceed aright therein, for the per-
petuall benefit of these our Nations, and of the Churches of Christ.

2Arber, IV, p. 61.

202

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

to show a copy of this date in any of the larger libraries in either
England or America, or a record of any having been sold at auction
during recent years. Copies of both the 1612 and 1627 editions,
however, are fairly numerous.

There is also a seeming contradiction between the statement “in
many things abridged, and made lesse then before,” and the exam¬
iners’ remark “much more compleate and perfect after so much long
trauell and experience,” especially since the new edition when it did
appear in 1627 was, to all intents and purposes, merely a reprint of
the original. The probability is that the Consolation was intended
as a reworking of his former book, a conclusion borne out by an
analysis of the contents.

It is a small treatise, little more than one fourth the size of the
Ludns,1 and divides itself into three parts. Brinsley first shows in the
eloquence born of sincerity the crying need of improvement in the
schools of the colonies, the inroads of the Papists, the religious sig¬
nificance of learning, and the duty and the opportunities of the
schoolmasters which can be realized if they will but follow his direc¬
tions. He then gives, in the second section, a statement in general
“of such things as may (by God’s blessing) be easily effected in our
ordinarie Grammar schooles,” a slightly revised version of his re¬
capitulation of the contents of the Ludus as published in the 1612
edition and reprinted, without change, in that of 1627. It is likely
that this is the abridgment to which he alludes. The whole substance
of the earlier book is given in this brief compass : those who would
seek the expansion and elucidation of the points here mentioned are
referred to the larger work.2 The third division is a bibliography
of editions, text-books, translations, dictionaries, and general works
of reference which Brinsley has found helpful and which may be of
equal assistance to other teachers of the “meaner and ruder schools.”
This, it seems, might well be what the examiners had in mind when
they spoke of the book as being “much more compleate and perfect
after so much long trauell and experience.”

The Consolation, then, was quite likely intended as a brief hand¬
book, to be sold at a comparatively low figure and sent off to the
remote districts in order that schoolmasters might be stimulated to
more intelligent effort, supplied with a compendium of aims and

1 Ludus Literarius, 312 pages; Consolation, 84 pages.

ror a defense of its length, see Consolation, p. 27.

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES 203

methods to guide them in their teaching, and furnished with a list
of the most useful books for aiding them in the preparation of their
work from day to day. In parts it rises nearer to the plane of pure
literature than any of Brinsley’s other works, for, like Bunyan, he
wrote out the faith that was in him and his long acquaintance with
the Bible had given him eloquence of style.

The most popular of Brinsley’s text-books, however, seems to
have been the little handbook, in the form of a catechism, for exam¬
ining in Latin forms and constructions according to Lilly’s grammar.
The title under which the license was obtained 1 was The Posing of
the Partes ,2 but there are several references to it as The Posing of
the Accidence.3 First published in 1612, a second edition was
brought out in 1615, 4 in 1647 there wTas demand for a tenth edition,5
an eleventh six years later,8 the twelfth in 1669. The fifteenth edi¬
tion in 1687, 7 its seventy-fifth anniversary, is proof that the useful¬
ness of this textbook continued to be recognized for some time after
the author’s death.

This work Brinsley dedicated to “his much respected friend
Master Abraham Johnson, Counsellor at the Law, of Lincolnes Inne,”
whose father had given “grave advice and bounty’’ in his eagerness
that “the best, speediest, surest, and most easie wayes might be
found out, for all schools, according to our received grammer,” and
whose father-in-law. Master D. Chaderton, had “been pleased to
afford some principal experiments.” While acknowledging his in¬
debtedness to certain of his predecessors, the author finds their books
unsatisfactory in that their explanations are not sufficiently full, the
order is not always preserved, and they have “so many hard and
strange questions intermixed, not so necessary for the first enterers.”

1Arber, III, p. 476.

3 The Posing of the Partes: or A most plain and easie way of examining
the Accidence and Grammar, by Questions and Answers, arising directly out
of the words of the Rules. Whereby all schollers may attain most speedily
to the perfect learning, full understanding, and right use thereof, for their
happy proceeding in the Latine Tongue. Gathered purposely for the benefit
of Schools, and for the use and delight of Masters and Schollers.

5 See Arber IV, 215, in the list of Brinsley’s works, the right to publish
which Benjamin Fisher took over from Mann. Also the printer’s announce¬
ment quoted supra. Hoole in 1660 mentions it by this title as a book to
which he gives special commendation : A New Discovery, p. 173.

* In University of Cambridge Library.

* In British Museum.

* A copy of this edition in the Boston Public Library is the one which
has been consulted. It was presented by Wendell Phillips in 1882.

7 In British Museum.

204

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Brinsley has therefore arranged a gradation of his questions so that
they may be useful to classes in various stages of advancement.
Those marked with an asterisk are added to make the other questions
clearer and may be omitted; the “most necessary places” are desig¬
nated by a hand in the margin.

Equally important as such a question book in Brinsley’s scheme
for the teaching of Latin were the grammatical translations (i. e.,
English renderings in which the natural, not the rhetorical, order was
followed) of Latin authors, particularly those read during the first
years at school. There being none available, the enthusiastic school¬
master made his own and published them for the benefit of others.
He seems to have accumulated his theory so gradually and thoroughly
before the publication of the Ludus Literanus that he never had to
recant, and spent the rest of his academic life in doing consistently
what he might to make easier the applications of the principles
therein set forth. The preface or the title-page to each of his later
works (as far as they have been seen) is in effect an advertisement
of the comprehensive treatise of 1612.

In Chapter VIII of the 1627 edition of the Ludus, Brinsley lists
the grammatical translations which he has made, apparently arrang¬
ing them in the order in which they should appear in the course of
study of the grammar school:

1. Pueriles Confabulatiunculce, licensed in 1617, 1 a copy of which
is in the British Museum. The work translated was a collection of
simple phrases by Evaldus Gallus which was used frequently in the
schools of the day for children who were too young for the colloquies
of Corderius, Vives, or Erasmus. Mr. Foster Watson has charac¬
terized them as trite, petty, and unsuitable,” formed without a
consideration of actual children’s conversation. Brinsley, he tells us,
omitted and altered some of the dialogues that were “Popish, pro¬
fane, and filthy. 2 That he did not substitute another reading book
for them is additional proof that he was more concerned with method
than with matter. He took the curriculum largely as he found it,
but aimed to present the work in such a way that the results would
be more beneficial to the cause of learning.

2. Sententue Pueriles. Concerning this little book Mr. Watson
remarks: “The Latin edition was circulated in England, and it is

‘Arber III, p. 613.

* English Grammar Schools, pp. 347 and 348 n.

205

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

this to which Brinsley refers. He intended to supply a grammatical
translation for it, but does not seem to have done so.” 1 Whether
Mr. Watson was impelled to make this statement by the fact that
neither Cambridge nor the British Museum contains a copy or be¬
cause he was relying upon the bibliography in the Dictionary of
National Biography, or for some other reason, he was led into error.
The Stationers’ Register entered the book together with a gram¬
matical translation of Cato, and The Posing of the Partes on Feb¬
ruary 6, 1611-12, although the author’s name is not registered.2
Furthermore, the printer’s advertisement in the Ludus Literarius
already cited 3 proves that Brinsley had not only supplied the trans¬
lation but that its publication was scheduled for the immediate future.
If further evidence were needed it is found in a conclusive form in
the copy of the third edition of the translation now in the Harvard
University Library.4

The original of this translation is elsewhere eulogized by Brins¬
ley 5 “because it hath been gathered with much care and aduice to
enter yonger schollers, for Latine and matter every way meet for
them.” (The italics are not his). A comparison of the first few
sentences of the Latin, which he gives as illustration, with the trans¬
lation he afterwards made of them indicates something of their
“meet matter” and of his method.

Amicis opitulare
Alienis abstine
Arcanum cela
Affabilis esto

Help (your) friends
Abstain from other folks things
Conceal a secret
Be affable

3. Cato (concerning the precepts of common life). The Disticha
de Moribus were then in very general use, there being many Latin
editions for the schools of the day. The reading of them was pre-

1 Ibid., p. 359.

JArber, III, p. 476.

a See above p. 200.

4 Sententiae Pveriles : translated grammatically ; Leading the Learner, as
by the hand, to construe right, parse, make and prove the same Latin, also to
gette both the matter and phrase contained therein, most speedily and surely
without inconvenience. Don for the benefit of all Grammar-schools, chiefly
in ruder countries and places. The vse heer of you shall see after, in the
Preface to the carefull School-master, and more fully in the Grammar-
school, Chap. 8. Try according to the direction following, and then judge.
(1622.)

6 Ludus Literarius, Ch. IX.

2 o6

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

scribed by statutes, for example, at St. Bees,1 Sandwich,2 and Eton,-
and William Bullokar had translated them into English in 1585.
Hoole (1660) lists Cato as an author for the second form and tes¬
tifies to his precepts having been in use at the Rotherdam School
under his predecessor.4 Mulcaster, it is true, protested against
Cato’s Distichs as “too serious for little ones who mind nothing
beyond their toys,” 5 but he was apparently in the minority. A copy
of Brinsley’s translation in the British Museum is dated 1622, ten
years later than the first edition, so that there must have been
demand for at least one republication.

4. The Dialogues of Cordcrius. Evidently the Brinsley method
of teaching by means of these grammatical translations came to be
quite generally in vogue, for the four copies of this school-boy classic
(in translation) of which there is record represent four different
editions between 1614 and 1653.6 The original was a popular text¬
book of the day, including an account “of the school-boy’s mode of
life; of his daily occupation, his books, his play; the various char¬
acters and characteristics of boys; their life at home; the relations
to the market, the country, orchards, vineyards, tradesmen ; and their
physical, intellectual, and moral attitudes.” 7

5. Esop”s Fables. I have not been able to trace any copy of this
translation which was entered as by “John Brinsley” under date
of 7th, September 1617.8 The Fables, like Cato’s maxims, Brinsley
valued highly because of their significance aside from their use in
teaching Latin. The children must be questioned in some such way
as this :

Q. What Fable haue you against the foolish contempt of learning and
vertue, and preferring play or pleasure before it?

A. The Fable of the Cocke, scratching in the dung-hill.

He adds: “Cause them to make a good and pithy report of the Fable;
first in English, then in Latine : and that either in the words of the author,
or of themselues as they can; and as they did in English. For, this prac¬
tice in English to make a good report of a Fable, is of singular vse, to cause

1 Carlisle, I, 158.

1 Ibid., i, 605.

4 Maxwell-Lyte, History of Eton College, p. 149.

A New Discovery (Bardeen reprint), pp. 17 and 321.

^Watson, English Grammar Schools, p. 122.
l6s3L,brary of University of Cambridge, 1614, 1625; British Museum, 1636,

W atson, English Grammar Schools p 341

'Arber, III, 613. ' '

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES 207

them to vtter their mindes well in English ; and would neuer be omitted
for that and like purposes.1

Sententice, Cato, and Esop’s Fables were also useful to him in teach¬
ing composition, for, he says, they “haue the grounds of almost
euery Theame, which is meet to be propounded to schollers to write
on.” 2

6. Tullies Epistles gathered by Sturmius. As there is no men¬
tion of this translation in the reprint of the Stationers’ Register and
apparently no copy of it now in existence, there is a reasonable doubt
whether it ever reached publication. Brinsley’s failure to revise his
Ludus when the new edition was published in 1627 makes his list
of translations unreliable, especially as he qualifies it by the state¬
ment that he has either “finished them wholly, or some part of
them.” 3 He may not have lived to complete the work he con¬
templated ; he may not even have been alive when the Ludus was
reprinted.

7. Tullies Offices with the books adioyned to them: de Amicitia,
Senectute , Paradoxes. The first book of Tullies Offices “translated
Grammatically and also acccrdinge to the proprietie of our English
tongue” was registered 12th March 1615/16.4 Copies survive in
the British Museum and the Cambridge University Library. This
translation seems not to have been carried further than the first book,
which was reprinted in 1631.

8. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and de Tristibus. The first of these
was entered 23 February 1617/185 but evidently the de Tristibus
was not printed. Indeed in 1622 he recommended the use of another
translation. The British Museum contains a book entitled “Supple¬
ment to Mr. Brinsley’s Translation of the first book of Ovid’s Meta¬
morphosis, 1655 (Not seen).

9. Virgil’s Eglogs with his booke De Apibus. Entered 3rd
September 1619,® published 1620, republished 1633.

Following the list of translations which Brinsley stated that he
had finished “wholly or some part of each of them,” he added, “Also
these books following, whereof I find great benefit:

1 Ludus Literarius, Ch. IX.

'Ibid., Ch. XIII.

3 Ibid.. Ch. VIII.

4 Arber, III, 582.

' Ibid ., Ill, 619.

9 Ibid., Ill, 655.

208

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

1. Tullies Sentences for entring schollers, to make Latine truely
and purely in stead of giuing vulgars, and for vse of dayly trans¬
lating into Latine, to furnish with variety of pure Latine and
matter.

2. Aphthonius for easie entrance into Theames, for vnder-
standing, matter and order.

3. Drax his phrases, to help to furnish with copy of phrase both
English & Latine, and to attaine to propriety in both.

4. Flores poetarum, to prepare for versifying; to learne to versi-
fie, ex tempore, of any ordinary Theame.

5. Tully de Natura deorum; for purity, easinesse, variety, to
helpe to fit with a sweet stile for their disputations in the Vniuersities.

6. Terentius Christianas.

This list is interesting in that it indicates other books that Brins¬
ley thought of importance in the Latin course of the grammar school.
Probably he made translations of them for use with his own classes
but never published them. At least there seems to be no trace of any
such translations by him. The probability is that he had become
more vitally concerned with matters of religion and felt a more
immediate need for calling England to a realization of the dangers
that were besetting the land through a lack of Godliness. It was in
1618 that he was forced to leave Ashby because of the active part he
was taking in religious affairs. In the following year he did, it is
true, bring out the grammatical translation of Vergil but his' next
publications, in 1622, were of a serious and hortatory nature. A
Consolation for our Grammar Schooles, as already noted, contained
burning words to awaken those in charge of the colonies to a realiza¬
tion of the need for further education to do battle against the Papists
and the savages, to reclaim them from error. Even more eloquent

Brinsley s plea in the 3rd part of The True Watch a: nd Rule
of Life, which won popularity so immediately that it went into a
second edition in the following year (1623).* The summaries of
the two parts that had already been published were contained in the
commendatory epistle by Brinsley’s former schoolmate and fellow

<0 the ca„" of the l°

him by true repentance- shewing what ,.afat'e 0t Peace> and to turne unto
our selves to watching and Praver Tat SCS We c3Vu forthwith to betake
Chap. 9. (Cop.es in British Museum ShT t°/ -the Vision of EzekH
Public Library, Boston Athenaeum LibJaryO ^ University Llbrary, Boston

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES 209

student at Cambridge, Edward Elton, then pastor of St. Mary Mag¬
dalen’s at Barmondsey.

The First Part of the Trvc Watch, we learn, was a book '‘wherein
he hath set out to the view of all, the holinesse and integritie
of that way of life, which we all jointly professe (according to God’s
sacred word, and the good Lawes of our Christian Commonweale)
to the justifying of our Church against the Separatists, to be the
true Church of Jesus Christ, and that whosoever so walketh shall
undoubtedly finde eternall life, and in the meane while all heavenly
boldnesse, peace and joy. And not only against them, but also
against the superstitious and clamorous Papists, who herein slander
our Religion, affirming it to be a religion of carnall libertie, theirs
of perfect unity thereby to draw our people to a dislike of the eternall
truth of our blessed God, and to a liking of that popish way, which
is nothing but meere superstition in outward shews of devotion,
according to men’s inventions, and such as God never commanded,
or required; nay such as God hath most expressly forbidden, as
tending to utter perdition, both of soules and bodies.” 1 This, his
first religious publication, was published, we learn from Brinsley’s
address to the reader of The Third Part, at the time of the Powder-
treason (1605). By the time Mr. Elton wrote the commendatory
preface for the Third Part (1622), it was in its ninth edition.2

The Rule of Praier was the alternative title of the Second Part
of the Trve Watch, concerning which Elton notes, ‘‘whosoever
striveth so to watch & pray, shall undoubtedly be amongst them
that are as the chariots and horsemen of Israel, and helpe to save the
Hand.”

The Third Part is a warning based upon Ezekiel’s vision of the
destruction of Jerusalem. This exhortation, at times powerful in
its expression, is drawn out to the length of 568 pages, not counting
“a holy and fervent Prayer, according to the Contents of the booke,”
with which the volume closes.

The absence of school dramas from Brinsley’s curriculum for
the grammar school was probably due to his decided Puritan lean¬
ings. In any case he looked upon the stage as offering a clear proof
of the demoralization that had overtaken England. “What defence

1 The citations are from the 1622 edition of The Third Part, in the Boston
Public Library.

* The British Museum contains an eighth edition (1619).

210

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

can we make,” he asks, “for that concourse that is ordinarily to
those wanton places, in such places, even upon that day? In which
are the continuall sowing of all Atheisme ; and throwing the fire¬
brands of all filthy and noysome lusts into the hearts of poore simple
soules ; the stirring up and blowing the coals of concupiscence, to
kindle and increase the fire thereof, to breake out into an hideous
flame, untill it burne downe to hell — How can you take those fire¬
brands of hell into your bosomes and not be burnt? Is not every
filthy speech, each whorish gesture, such a firebrand cast by Sathan
into the heart of every wanton beholder, as a brand cast into a
bundle of toe. or into a barrell of gunpowder, to set all on fire of
a sudden ?” 1

Still another part of The True Watch appeared in 1624, the
last publication of Brinsley’s which we can date with certainty.
This was particularly addressed “to the plain-hearted seduced by
popery.”

But one other of his books remains to be noticed, an edition of
Stanbridge’s Vocabulary, 2 which was an exceedingly popular book

in its day.

Mr. Foster Watson thus described this edition printed “under
undoubtedly careful and enthusiastic editing of John Brinsley.” 3
“He has placed figures above each of the Latin nouns in the Vo¬

cabulary to show the Declension, and a letter to show the gender.
Adjectives of three terminations have bo placed above them to show
that they are declined like bonus. ‘If of three articles’ fel shows
them to be declined like felix, tr like tristis. Where pi is added, it
is to show that the word has only or usually the plural number.
Verbs have the conjugation marked by a figure before the letter C
standing for conjugation. Brinsley hopes, therefore, the dictionarius
may be also a help to the grammar.”

Although the three editions in the British Museum are dated
1630, 1645, and 1647, there is no reason to suppose that it was not
published earlier. It was unquestionably a book that was in demand
and his was a most useful edition, judged by the standards of
editorship prevailing at that time. It seems likely, then, that Brins-
1 The Third Part, p. 343.

yJiSTT Erbnon Relimat»™, «« Vocabulariutn metricum olitn a J
Stanbrigxo dxgestum, nunc vero . . . locupletatus . . . opera
Watson, English Grammar Schools, p. 386.

JOHN BRINSLEY AND HIS TREATISES

211

ley’s educational writings were : first, the general treatise on prob¬
lems and methods of grammar-school instruction, then the gram¬
matical translations and the word-list above-mentioned, followed by
the abbreviated Ludus with an exhortation for the “consolation of
our grammar schooles,” and, toward the end of his life, religious
writings almost exclusively. As with Milton, the rise of Puritanism
and the consequent necessity of warring strenuously against its op¬
ponents seem gradually to have led him to cast aside everything else
that he might work more zealously for what was plainly the thing of
greatest significance to him, the religious welfare of mankind and
of England.

In all his work Brinsley is primarily the educator. A teacher
whose aim was high, he is not a destructive critic. When he diag¬
noses an ailment it is only that he may generously and confidently
offer a remedy. Constructively he offers his definition of a “true
nursery” (or an ideal school) as one “wherein learned Maisters and
Vshers, being incouraged with nieete maintenance and due rewards,
do follow the best and most approved courses, labouring constantly
to put the same in vse.” 1

Method was to this headmaster at Ashby an all important thing.
If only the right one were used, the school might be “the same as
the goodly gardens, & as among the little singing birds, in the flour¬
ishing Spring.” He likens “the shortest and fairest wav of teaching”
to the “shortest and safest cut in navigation” that brings in double
gain. The scholars will profit, learning as much in seven years as
they would otherwise have acquired in ten ; the masters will be free
.from vexation ; learning will come into greater esteem ; the number
of benefactors will consequently increase.

Uniformity, thoroughness, concentration, training of the memory,
all valuable for their usefulness in preparing for later learning and
later life, were the main planks in his educational platform. He
touches upon other principles in passing: the careful gradation in
the form of questions, the value of imitation based upon the best
models, double translation, the gain in having the children mark
in their book words that are difficult for them or which may be of
future use. In all this the:e is nothing new for us, illuminating as
it was for Spoudeus, the disheartened visitor.

1 Consolation, p. 6.

212

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

But one cannot fail to respond to the zeal of John Brinsley as
he writes of the responsibility and importance of the teacher, who
must not discourage or dishearten, must reward all deserving effort,
and must teach the boys to love learning, always mindful that he
must “do all to the end to make them men.”

BALLAD NOTES TAKEN IN BUCKS COUNTY,
PENNSYLVANIA

John C. Mendenhall

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

IN the autumn of 1908, I wrote down from recitation at Rich-
boro, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the fragments of traditional
ballads that follow, but I refrained for a time from publishing
them because there seemed to be a possibility of further discoveries.
These were not made, however, and, without being entirely for¬
gotten, the matter rested, until recently an article was solicited for
the present volume. Again I sought to add to the fragments, but
none of my informants is now living, and their friends and children
remember only vaguely that there were such things. Often not even
the name or general outline of any ballad could be recalled. So
I conclude that the ballad tradition in this part of the country, mori¬
bund in 1908, is practically extinct in 1923, and that inasmuch as
the fragments that I have present some few points of interest in
themselves and in relation to the history of American balladry, it
is best to publish them without further delay.

That the tradition existed at all in southern Bucks County is a
little surprising. This part of the state, adjacent to Philadelphia
County, was settled almost exclusively by English Friends, and
they remained dominant well into the nineteenth century; in fact,
they are still strong in the very district of the latter county, Byberrv,
where the Lord Bateman fragment was learned from her grand¬
mother by the mother of my principal informant. The latter told me
that her mother, Mrs. John Randall, would not infrequently break ofT
when she found herself singing these old songs, which people even in
her youth had begun to call silly as well as to stigmatize as worldly,
and taking down a volume of Elias Hicks read long in it, as a kind
of penance or atonement. Mrs. Randall’s grandmother, by whom
she was brought up, lived during the Revolution, and some of her

213

214 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

anecdotes of it are still told in the family. This version of Lord
Bateman, therefore, represents an oral tradition antecedent to that
epoch.

It is of interest for that reason, and for its provenance, and also,
I think, because it has some points of difference from any other
version which I have seen. Its nearest parallel is The Turkish
Lady” reported from Kentucky in the Journal of American Folk
Lore, XX (1907), 251. Only in this do the incident of the cellar,
the epithet “strong” for wine, and the splitting of the table into
three pieces occur simultaneously. Lord Bateman’s “farewell to
the land of living” is unique.1

The fragment as given came from the memory of Mrs. E. J.
Errickson, Mrs. Randall’s daughter. Her paternal aunt Eastburn,
a native of Northampton Township, then a remarkably preserved old
lady in her ninety-second year, who could both read and sew with¬
out glasses, listened to my reading of it, and though she could not
supply, verbally, the missing portions of the story, she did make
several corrections (notably the lady’s name), which I list in foot¬
notes as variant readings. They represent what I think an older
form of the ballad (nearer, perhaps, to some ancient broadside text)
which Mrs. Eastburn had learned from oral tradition in her youth,
and which she remembered being sung, with others, at every
Northampton quilting and apple-cutting party seventy and eighty
years ago. Several elderly people corroborated the text and the
popularity of the ballad, but could offer no changes or additions.

LORD BATEMAN

Lord Bateman he was a noble lord,1
A noble lord was he.3

He determined for to go a-broad
Distant countries for to see.

Oh he sailed east and he sailed west
And he sailed to a Turkish shore.

Where he was taken and put in prison
With no hopes of freedom any more.

* Consult Pound, American Songs and Ballads, No. 14.

Lord Bateman was a nobleman.

A lord of high degree.

BALLAD NOTES TAKEN IN PENNSYLVANIA 215

The jailer had a lovely daughter,

The fairest creature ye e’er did see.

She stole the keys of her father’s prison
And declared she’d set him free.

She took him down to her father's cellar;

She filled him with wine so strong ;

And every time she drank his health

She declared, “Lord Bateman, I wish you were my own.”

“I have lands and I have houses,

I have a name of high degree;

I ll give it all to the lowly lady

Who out of prison will set me free.’’

She took him down unto the harbor ;

There she bargained a ship for him ;

She says, “Farewell, my best-beloved ;

I fear I ne’er shall see you again.

“I will make a bargain for seven long years,

A bargain I will make for seven years long;

If you won’t marry no other woman,

I won’t marry no other man.”

Seven long years are past and over,

Seven long years and two or three ;

And she packed up her gold and diamonds.

And declared Lord Bateman she would go see.

When she reached Lord Bateman's castle,

She knocked so loud she made it ring.

She says, “Is this Lord Bateman’s castle?

Anci is he himself within?”

“Yes, oh yes !" replied the porter,

“He’s just brought his new bride home. . . .”

*******

“Seven long years I’ve been your porter,

Seven years and two or three,

And now at your gates stands the greatest lady
That ever my two eves did see.

“She’s a diamond ring on her little finger,

And on her others two or three.

And she wears more ’jewels about her neck
Than does your bride and her company.

Gold about her middle.

2l6

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

"She wishes a slice of Lord Bateman’s bread,

And a bottle of his wine so strong,

And tells him never to forget that lady
That freed him from his prison strong.”

Lord Bateman rose up from the table,

And split it into pieces three,

And said, “Farewell to this land of living,

Since my Grue love1 has crossed the sea.

“This day, sir, I married your daughter,

But she is never the worse for me,

She rode here on a horse and saddle,

She shall ride back in a coach and three.

*******

I unearthed memories of numerous other ballads or ballad-like
narrative songs, several people being my informants, but chiefly
Mrs. Errickson and Mrs. Krewson Cornell. They included Death
and the Lady, of which only the title was remembered and the fact
that the piece was very long; The Farmer Boy; The Butcher Boy,
which seems to have originated in Jersey City ; James Bird, a dismal
story of desertion and punishment from the brig Niagara during the
War of 1812; The Dying Californian; and the universal favorites,
Lord Bateman and The House Carpenter. The local version of the
latter showed nothing more remarkable than extraordinary dilution,
as in one well-known stanza quoted to me :

She dressed her in her richest robes,

She was glorious to behold,

And when she walked along the street,

She shone like glittering gold.

There were also traditions of ballad-books. Diligent search failed
to recover any of these, but one, well-remembered in a certain
family, contained, among other pieces, James Bird and Lord “Bake-
man” in a version identical, declared Mrs. Cornell, with that which
appeared in Modern Philology, II (1904-05), 301, — a copy of which
I gave her — and simultaneously in the Journal of American Folk
Lore, XVIII (1905), 209. Sometimes also single copies were made
of a new or favorite ballad, and preserved for reference, like old

1 Susanna.

BALLAD NOTES TAKEN IN PENNSYLVANIA 217

family recipes. The customary destruction of personal papers after
their owner’s death had caused the loss of several such, including
one of Lord Bateman which might have given the missing portions
of the version recorded above. In general, however, the tradition
was oral ; it would have to be traced through several generations and
many different mouths to the original printed copy.

THE BUTCHER BOY

This quasi-ballad I give as typical of the last stages of its art.
I had it from two different persons. One was a young man, a
poetling of some promise, Edward Hicks Streeter Terry, now dead,
whose mother had often sung him and her other children to sleep
crooning it ; from her he secured the version here given. The other
was an old man from a different neighborhood. The few verbal
differences of his version are indicated in marginal notes. Mr.
Terry also gave me the tune of this ballad, but as there is some un¬
certainty about the notation I shall not set it down.1

In Jersey City where I did dwell

A butcher boy that I love v so well [v Loved.

He courted me my heart away.

And now with me he will not stay.

There is an inn in this same town
Where my love goes and sits him down,

He takes a strange girl on his knee

And (he) v tells to her what he don’t tell me. [v Omit.

vIt is grief forv me. — I’ll tell you why! — [v’Tis ... to

Because she has more gold than I ! —

But her gold will melt v and her silver fly, [▼ rust

And in time of need she’ll be v poor as I. [v as insert.

1 Speaking of ballad-tunes reminds me that an old gentleman once told
me that in the ’40’s of the last century an old ballad-seller, survivor of a
still earlier day, had a little sidewalk stand in Second Street, at Willow,
his fluttering ballads (printed on strips of paper like hand bills) secured to
a line by clothes-pins. The subjects were recent tragedies. The strips con¬
tained only the words, but had a note to the effect that the tune was that
of such-and-such another song. These tunes the seller knew, and taught
right there upon the curb to his customers. My informant had often heard
him teaching two or three earnest pupils at once. To the market nearby
many of the Bucks County farmers resorted, often with their wives or
daughters, and I have no doubt that the last ballads imported into Bucks
County were from this source — The Dying Californian, for instance.

2l8

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

I go upstairs to make my bed
And nothing to my mother said,

My mother comes upstairs to me
Saying, “What is the matter, my daughter dear ?”

Oh mother, mother, do you not know

What grief and pain and sorrow, v woe ? [v oh ! insert.

Go get a chair to sit me down;

And pen and ink to write it down.

On every line she dropped a tear,

While calling back her Willy dear,

And when her father he came home
He said, “Where has my daughter gone?”

He went upstairs, the door he broke,

He found her hanging upon a rope.

He took his knife and cut her down,

And on her breast these lines he found:

“Oh what a silly maid am I
To hang myself for a butcher boy !

Go dig my v grave both wide and deep, [Y a

Place a marble stone at my head and feet,

And on my breast a turtle dove
To show the world I died for love.”

It interests me to record the accident by which I secured these
fragments from an oblivion not perhaps altogether deserved. All
my life I have been familiar with this country ; and the people named,
with the exception of the last, were all friends of my mother from
girlhood. Yet nothing ever indicated the existence of these memories
until a long visit during the autumn of 1908. As the evenings length¬
ened in, I did a good bit of reading, and one night, as I finished
Bayard Taylor’s Story of Kennett, I remarked upon the House
Carpenter ballad which the old lady sang at the wedding that is
the closing incident of the book. My hostess, Mrs. Errickson, re¬
marked that her mother had sometimes sung a song of that name.
Then I spoke about the ballads, and about the age of the Lord
Bateman story, which, as a small boy about 1898, I had heard the
first stanza of sung in a play called Rosedale, and remembered, be¬
cause a youngster to whom his nurse had been singing it was stolen
by gipsies; it was his link with the past, by means of which in after
years he was restored to his own. This song Mrs. Errickson said

BALLAD NOTES TAKEN IN PENNSYLVANIA 219

had been a favorite with her mother, and had interested her ; she
recalled some parts of it at once, and continuing to think of it
during the night, was able to repeat to me next day as much as
I have given above.

Though sometimes laughed at, the ballads remained popular
with individuals and in company as I have said, during the first
half of the nineteenth century in this part of the country, but about
the time of the Civil War they went out of favor. The songs of
Civil War days first replaced them to a considerable extent, but
before long increasing contact with the city, and the vogue of par¬
lor-organs, melodeons, and pianos, with the songs and tunes that
their exercise-books and new sheet-music made fashionable, drove
the ballads completely out of the field. A few grandmothers, a
fewer mothers, crooned them to children, or as they went about
their housework ; a roving hired-man of the old-fashioned sort now
and then whistled or even sang them; but, as I have said, even
these are now gone from that part of the country, and the natives
for the most part no longer even know that balladry ever existed
amongst them.

THE ARTIST AND HIS TECHNIQUE
T. D. O’Bolger

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

“Le style, c’est Thomme meme.” — Buffon.

IT is a commonplace of at least English literature that very little
of a personal nature is known about one of the most voluminous
of English authors, William Shakespeare. The writer has
seen a book entitled The Facts About Shakespeare which to the
best of his belief, was compiled by two careful commentators, and
which was yet so slight that it would make no ungainly lines in the
pocket of a light summer suit. Within, the bulk of the material
was drawn from documents and comments by other hands : in other
words it consisted of indirect information rather than direct.

It contained no prefaces, notes, or photographs, yet Shakespeare
wrote himself not only liberally but very strenuously into his verse
and plays. His personal gaiety; his delight in fourth dimensional
logic (the half crack-brained logic of the fool, Mad Tom, The
Gravedigger, Touchstone, Falstaff, and Jacques); his pessimism;
his deep-rooted loathing of narrow or mean personal opinion or
behavior ; his almost inveterate dislike of the lower orders ; his
disposition to glorify station, particularly kingship; his facile swing
from bitter to oversweet interpretation of woman’s character ; his
moments of energetic self-assertion, as when he put it firmly on
record that his verse would outlive the brazen monuments of princes,
as it has done, though not the verse that he esteemed so much as
the musical rhetoric and moral challenge of 'his plays, — all this is
pretty much the heart and nervous system of William Shake¬
speare written larger and all the more enduringly because it was done
as subconsciously as it is in the nature of art to be. Matthew
Arnold denied what he called the grand style to Shakespeare. He
meant the iron restraint of the master spirit when it is tense with
emotion, yet is under the calm direction of the working spirit. Ber-

221

222

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

nard Shaw has put it in his own way when, in commenting on a
play by the ebullient Marie Corelli, he said that a great literary
masterpiece represents the victory of a powerful mind over a pow¬
erful imagination.

When Matthew Arnold charges that this master constraint was
wanting to Shakespeare he is, on the whole, probably finically right.
But there are moments when Shakespeare achieved it and even held
it. Oddly, and yet not oddly, the moment when his self-revelation
reaches some of its most memorable if not impressive heights is
when he makes open confession of his technique. Whether it be
in the lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where he tells how

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name;

Of whether it be in the talks with the players, with Polonius, and
even with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the Gravedigger, there
is a resilience and liveliness in the thought and expression that raises
it to an unusual level even for Shakespeare. The talk with the
players in Hamlet is keyed up to an unusual pitch of intense feel¬
ing; the phrasing is perhaps even better than anything else in
Shakespeare ; the sarcasm directed at the robustious, periwig-pated
ranter who tears a passion to tatters; the intense scorn of the
mouther who “plays to the gallery’’ ; or the man who “horses” his
pari with the aim of getting the unskillful man’s laugh; all these
are not only technique lifted to a most unusual pitch of statement,
but such a revelation of the man who wrote and shaped the plays,
and his sense of composition and interpretation as appears but sel¬
dom even in the most intimate and familiar literature. It is the
most finished codification of the ordinary rules of composition that
the writer knows anything about. Every laborer after expression,
from the college Freshman to the octogenarian, Goethe, working at
the second part of Faust, can con these pages to his profit. Probably
more spirits have thrilled to these lines than have thrilled to any
other equal documentation from the pen of Shakespeare.

It has always been so, I think. The moments in which an author

THE ARTIST AND HIS TECHNIQUE 223

confesses his understanding of his art have an inevitable natural
fascination for the layman. On the other hand, they represent
moments of intense preoccupation on the part of the author, and
so his thought and expression, and the attention and understanding
of the reader are fused and blent with an unusual degree of felicity.
How the other man works is always an interesting theme both to
craftsman and casual observer.

Which is all very well, until we come to ask whether Shake¬
speare is as consistent in practice as he is precise and enthusiastic
in precept. He is not. Hamlet’s soliloquy — not the really fine solilo¬
quy “O, what a base and peasant slave am I,” but the popular “To
be or not to be” is, in its way, the robustious, periwig-pated fellow
tearing his passion to tatters. It is almost preposterously out of
character. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the favorite of Fortune
is not the man to be making “windy suspiration of forced breath”
the while he utters forth, a little shrilly, a prettily phrased outcry
against heaven and earth and the thousand natural shocks that
flesh is heir to because his withers are wrung and his kibes galled
by misfortune. What does this young play actor and play goer, this
faineant Prince, this dilettante in emotion and action know of the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the slights patient
merit suffers at the hands of the unworthy? The cunning of
Machiavelli on the lips of Polonius would be as much in character.

It may be argued that Hamlet was a man of thought, — observant,
reflective, responsive. He was nothing of the kind. He was ever
in two if not in half a dozen minds about everything that happened
to him. He says so over and over. The very decision of the actor
in being what he acts astounds him. “What is Hecuba to him or
he to Hecuba?” Yet the mime plays Hecuba to the pink of perfec¬
tion, whereas he cannot live up to his convictions.

Hamlet’s mood is “to be or not to be?” He is a novice knock¬
ing at the door of experience : he does not know ; he cannot de¬
cide. He is just a happy college boy returned from school, senti¬
mentally responsive to the factitious side of life, to the fun of
Yorick and the histrionic capacity of the players. But when he is
confronted by just one of the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is
heir to” — the murder of his father — he is as unsettled as a “base
and peasant slave.” He runs to the factitious — to the play — to de¬
cide his indecision. The play is the thing, and it is not the thing.

224 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

He speaks for William Shakespeare : in soliloquy and out, he is a
mouthpiece for the dolors of the London dramatist rather than the
Prince of Denmark. Not that it matters greatly for whom he talks.
The talk and the thinking are the thing.

And poor old Polonius: what a merciless scarification he is sub¬
jected to from the time of his coming in, to his being dragged out.
A stray mongrel would have more kind words flung to him than fall
to the poor old man's share in the whole play. True, he was a
bore, but he had some claims on human consideration. Instead he
is torn to tatters as mercilessly as any passion ever was.

The ranting before Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, and before
Laertes is deliberate and forced. But when we come again to the
penultimate scene of the play, where Osric enters to announce the
duel, we hear Shakespeare at his bitterest again in his scorn of re¬
dundancy and pleonasm. Not only is the fault laid to the door of
the “water-spider,” Osric, who “complied with his dug,” but to the
whole “yesty times” which when put to the test the bubble is out.

It is an admirable treatise of its kind in composition ; it is like¬
wise an almost startling picture of the intimate personality of Will¬
iam Shakespeare, artist-technician.

In our own day a gentleman with a very different sense of the
value of reticence in art, and who has raised the question (and partly
answered it) as to whether his art is not better than Shakespeare’s,
has likewise washed his technical linen in full public view. In one
of the most pretentious of the many prefaces which he has written,
he discusses style. He admits the force and value of the well-
chosen word in the well-turned phrase and then makes the asser¬
tion that the Alpha and Omega of style is effectiveness of expres¬
sion. True. But what is effectiveness of expression? Carlyle,
Matthew Arnold, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith (who is said to have told
the Doctor that if he wrote a story about little fishes they would
all talk like whales), Herbert Spencer, Walter Pater, George Moore,1
—thousands of men of letters have answered that question, each in
his individual manner and each as best he might, for what tale could
an author tell more acute and more vital to his sense and to the pub¬
lic’s understanding of him than this tale of how he shapes his

See in particular Mr. Moore’s admirable paper on Tourguenieff in Im¬
pressions and Opinions.

THE ARTIST AND HIS TECHNIQUE 225

soul and thought and how he directs his pen? “If you would have
me weep,” said Horace, “you must first weep yourself.”

This is impression: the mark in the soul of the artist. To con¬
vey it in apt, stirring speech “with good accent and good discretion”
is expression. It is style. It is rhetoric. It is composition. It is
the whole artist at white heat. It is an imperishable subject, an
inexhaustible study.

DR. FURNESS’S METHOD IN EDITING THE
NEW VARIORUM

Daniel E. Owen

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

IN 1848, Fanny Kemble, one of his father’s parishioners and a
family friend, presented Horace Howard Furness, a boy of
fifteen, with a ticket to her forthcoming series of Shakespeare
readings. “Admit Mr. Furness to all readings,’’ so ran the in¬
scription on the card. Young Furness did not miss a reading, and
from the delight he took in Mrs. Kemble’s interpretation of the
plays he was accustomed to date his lifelong interest in Shakespeare.

In i860, Furness was elected to the Shakspere Society of
Philadelphia. The first fruits of his membership were notes on The
Tempest, privately printed, and a scrap-book variorum Hamlet de¬
scribed by Dr. Furness in a letter to W. J. Rolfe, dated Jan. 28,
1900, as follows: “As for the time when I began to work over
Shakespeare and study him with zeal, it began in ’62 or ’63 when I
made a mighty Variorum Hamlet, cutting out the notes of five or
six editions, besides the Variorum of 1821, and pasting them on a
page with a little rivulet of text. ’T was a ponderous book, of Qto.
size and eight or nine inches thick — I took great delight in burning
it some years ago. But the work revealed to me that it was high
time to begin a new Variorum, that we might start afresh.” 1

During the year 1866-67, the Shakspere Society devoted its
meetings to a thorough reading of Romeo and Juliet. “Perhaps we
may flatter ourselves,” writes a historian of the Society, “that this
year’s reading of Romeo and Juliet may have had a direct effect,
perhaps been causa efdciens, in guiding the mind of Dr. Furness to
select Romeo and Juliet as the first play to be discussed in the ‘New
Variorum.’ ” 2

1 The Letters of Horace Howard Furness, 1922, II, 55.

1 Shakspere Society of Philadelphia: Histories: Mallery and Ashhurst,
1898, II, 12.

227

228 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Dr. Furness himself ascribed his selection to a predilection for
the tragedy. “I chose Rom. and Jul. as the first,” he wrote to
Rolfe, “merely because I was enamoured with the play and I thought
’t was probable that I should never edit a second.” 1

In preparing his edition of Romeo and Juliet , Furness had the
counsel and encouragement of such scholars as Rolfe and F. J.
Child. Edwin Forrest lent his copies of the second and third folios.
On his own part, Furness purchased Shakespeariana so extensively
that by 1875 his library was already a notable collection. It received
important accessions in later years and as at present maintained by
Dr. Horace Howard Furness, Jr. offers an enviable array of critical
apparatus including the four folios, a number of original quartos
three of them once the property of Edward Capell and full of his
collations, facsimiles, some fifty editions of Shakespeare, from the
earliest of Rowe to the most recent; together with collateral works
in great variety. When, in his Phi Beta Kappa address delivered at
Harvard, June 25, 1908, Dr. Furness implored the members of
his audience not to write an essay on Hamlet, he enforced his exhor¬
tation with the statement that his own library contained over four
hundred books on the play of Hamlet alone.

The New Variorum of Romeo and Juliet appeared in 1871 and
was cordially received on both sides of the Atlantic. The first edi¬
tion of five hundred copies was exhausted in six weeks and the pub¬
lishers have been reprinting it at short intervals ever since. Con¬
gratulatory letters poured in from all quarters and although he had
not contemplated a complete edition of Shakespeare on the heroic
model of his first attempt, it became evident, as Furness himself
remarked, that “he was in for it.” Increasing deafness had ren¬
dered difficult the practice of his chosen profession of law and the
success of his venture with Romeo and Juliet pointed to a congenial
alternative occupation. So he sat down to Shakespeare for good
and all, and by forty years of patient industry compiled fifteen
volumes of the New Variorum , a monument of American scholar¬
ship, distinguished among works of its class by the sanity and whole¬
some humor of its unacademic editor. “Mere industry can do
much, says Mr. Talcott Williams, “but mere industry could not
build the monument of these volumes. . . . There is a certain form
of stupidity never found except in notes. . . . Nothing saves a man
1 Letters, loc. cit.

METHOD IN EDITING THE NEW VARIORUM 229

from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr.
Furness, man and work together, brim with it.” 1

Successive volumes of the New Variorum are marked by growth
in assurance and an increasing percentage of personal comment. In
the beginning, Furness resolved that “he would be the merest drudge,
simply arranging and codifying the notes of others and would utter
no faintest chirp of his own.” “But,” he writes to Rolfe, “as you
know my resolution did not hold out, and now, ever since I edited
Othello I gabble like a tinker.” Dr. Furness does not “gabble like a
tinker.” His comment is that of a genial scholar, delivered from
the aridity of pottering criticism by a “shrewd humor, held well in
check, which illuminates the dusty path of learning,” and he is not
given to the garrulous speculation so prevalent in the field of Shake¬
spearean research. “An undecipherable word or phrase never pre¬
sented itself to his level judgment as a species of riddle, to be guessed
at frantically until the end of time. If he did not know what the word
or the phrase meant, he said so, and went on his way rejoicing.” 2

For the collation of texts and the preparation of explanatory
notes, Dr. Furness evolved a method of which it is legitimate to
speak in the present tense since it has been continued without im¬
portant modification by Dr. Horace Howard Furness, Jr., on whom
the mantle of the New Variorum has fallen.3 In the first four
volumes of the New Variorum , Dr. Furness used an eclectic text;
subsequent volumes are based on the text of the First Folio. The
initial step toward the making of a new volume of the Variorum
is to remove from a copy of Lionel Booth’s facsimile reprint of
the First Folio the signatures comprising the play selected, which
are interleaved and separately bound. The lines are then num¬
bered, not according to the metrical system, as in an ordinary volume
of Shakespeare, but typographically. A number is written oppo¬
site every line of print, partial lines, such as those divided between
two speakers, being assigned separate numbers ; so that when the
enumeration has been completed, the margin of the text shows a
closely written column of consecutive numbers, one for each and

1 “Our Great Shakspere Critic,” Century Magazine , Nov., 1912.

* Miss Agnes Repplier, “Horace Howard Furness,” Atlantic Monthly,
Nov., 1912.

* For such of the following details as have not previously appeared in
print, the present writer is indebted to Dr. H. H. Furness, Jr., who has
courteously submitted to the needful enquiries.

230

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

every line of type. In the hands of a scholar, purely mechanical
tasks are more liable to error than those demanding greater intelli¬
gence. The numbering of lines, therefore, is done in pencil to al¬
low ready correction.

With the interleaved copy of the play in hand, collation of texts
is begun. First the folios and then the quartos, if any, are laid
out and their readings minutely compared. Dr. Furness called this
process “running the line.” Variant readings are recorded in pencil.

After the collation of folios and quartos comes the examination
of forty critical editions of Shakespeare, beginning with Rowe and
advancing in chronological order of publication. Annotations are
now made in ink with the aid of sundry short-hand symbols invented
to do away with the labor of constantly rewriting the names of
successive editors which are represented on the inter-leaves by a
system of dots, dashes, and undulatory lines. During this second
stage in collation, memorandum is made of notes in the various
editions likely to prove useful later.

The collation of texts for a single play consumes from six to
eight weeks during which the worker must sit at his desk every day
for union hours, at least. In one of his letters, Dr. Furness men¬
tions an “exhausting day in its long stretch of close attention.” With
two brief intervals of rest, he had been busy collating texts from
10.30 in the morning until midnight, when he relieved the tension
by writing the letter in question. “For forty years he worked on
an average ten hours out of the twenty-four and, under pressure,
thought little of adding a few hours more.” 1 Toilsome as colla¬
tion is, at best, its rigors were somewhat mitigated in the case of
Dr. Furness by his remarkable visual memory. “I read over about
sixty or seventy lines in the First Folio,” he writes, “and these
lines I can remember, down to the most insignificant comma, for
hours or as long as I am at work on them. When they are finished
and I turn to a fresh column, every trace of them is vanished.
While they are present I could write down from memory every
divergence in any subsequent edition. This goes from me utterly
the minute I turn to another set. I wonder if it is so with every
one. Perhaps I may thank this peculiarity, if it be one, for my
accuracy.” 2

1 Miss Repplier in article cited.

% Letters, II, 14.

METHOD IN EDITING THE NEW VARIORUM 231

Collation of texts finished, the play taken from the Booth re¬
print is laid aside for an interleaved copy of the Variorum of 1821
in which the lines are numbered, in pencil as before, but by pages
instead of scenes. The first line on any page is No. 1 and the last
line on that page completes the series. By this system of enumera¬
tion, time is saved in numbering the lines, chances of error are re¬
duced, and the numbers are kept conveniently low.

Now comes the compilation of notes. The work consists in veri¬
fying or expanding notes already printed in the Variorum of 1821
and, more especially, in adding to them from the abundant critical
essays and editions of Shakespeare which have appeared during the
last century. The task of reading all of the literature bearing on
a play occupies from nine months to a year and a half. Material
selected for insertion in the New Variorum is indicated, by reference
only, on the interleaves of the working copy.

Nearly two years have passed over the head of our editor before
he is ready to prepare his manuscript for the printer. Now the
shorthand of the textual memoranda must be expanded and notes
must be copied in full from their numerous sources. And a final
piece of work remains to be done, most troublesome and exacting
of all in its demands on the judgment of the editor. There must
be an appendix to the volume, consisting of exhaustive treatises on
the date of the play and its sources, together with estimates of the
characters in the play selected from the works of noted interpretative
critics, details of costume, and other topics of a miscellaneous nature
including, perhaps, extended discussion of obscure passages in the
play. The inevitable appendix is in the mind of the editor from
the very beginning and as material for it is constantly coming to
hand, he keeps by him an indexed notebook the pages of which
gradually fill with references.

Three months of proof-reading and wrestling with the printer
and another impressive volume has been added to the New Variorum.
The editor sends off a few presentation copies, writes a letter or
two of humorous self-congratulation, and then, if he is a Dr. Fur¬
ness, he forgets his labor and goes tarpon-fishing. But in a few
weeks he is back at his desk. Another play has been excised from
the mutilated Booth folio and the column of pencil numbers is ex¬
tending itself on the margin.

Forty years of all this — enough, one would say, to convert a

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

232

man’s blood corpuscles into semicolons — and yet Dr. Furness never
withered into the old and sere of dusty pedantry, but remained to
the end the very type of the gentleman scholar in whom literary ap¬
preciation could not be smothered by meticulous research. In 1908,
when, with thirty-seven years of steady research behind him, he ad¬
dressed his Harvard audience, this was his word on the study of
Shakespeare : “Keep clearly in mind the purpose of your study. It
is for pleasure above all things ; the pleasure to be derived from pity
and fear in the Tragedies, and from amusement in the Comedies.” 1

1 Phi Beta Kappa Address, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Sept., 1908.

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

Daniel B. Shumway
Professor of German, University of Pennsylvania

THE English poet Thomas Campbell reached maturity in an
age when a strong interest in German literature was mani¬
festing itself in England. Previous to the middle of the
eighteenth century this had by no means been the case. In their
insular position the English had concerned themselves very little
about Germany or German literature. What they did know
about the latter was often obtained through the medium of the
French in whose literature the English had always been greatly in¬
terested. Thus Goethe’s Werther was translated into English from
the French edition of Aubry.1 When finally German works did
begin to appear in an English garb they were such as had been
written under the influence of English authors and therefore in a
style that appealed to the English public. Thus one of the first
German works to be translated into English in the eighteenth cen¬
tury was Gellert’s novel Das Lebert der schwedischen Grafin von G.
which had been written under the influence of Richardson’s senti¬
mental novel Pamela. It appeared under the title: The History of
the Swedish Countess of Guildenstern.2 A second translation fol¬
lowed in 1763. Similarly Klopstock’s Messias which owed its in¬
spiration to Milton’s Paradise Lost appeared in translation in 1763.
It found, however, little approval, partly because of the wretched
translation in prose, partly because of its mawkishly sentimental
character, so different from the sturdy, virile style of Milton. From
the sixth decade on, the interest in German literature grew apace.
Gessner’s “Death of Abel” and his idylls were translated and be¬
came exceedingly popular. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm was per¬
formed on the London stage in the summer of 1786 under the title

1 See John L. Haney, German Literature in England before 1790 (Ameri¬
cana Germanica, Vol. IV).

a From what source the English translator supplied the full name is not
apparent. Gellert never used anything but the abbreviation G.

233

234 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

of The Disbanded Officer, or the Baroness of Bruchsal and had a
successful run of eleven nights. The English version of his Nathan
the Wise, which had appeared in prose five years before, was, how¬
ever. most unfavorably reviewed, probably because of the liberality
of its religious views.1 On the other hand Wieland s works in the
gallant style of the French naturally proved a success. Goethe s
sentimental novel Die Leiden des Jungen W erthers, written like
Gellert’s, under the influence of Richardson, achieved wide popu¬
larity. William Taylor of Norwich, who was greatly interested in
German literature, made an excellent translation of Lessing’s Nathan
and Goethe’s Iphigenie. By his translation of Burger’s famous bal¬
lad Lenore he inspired Sir Walter Scott to try his hand at a transla¬
tion of the same poem and of Burger’s ballad Der wilde Jdger and
later of Goethe’s Gotz. Schiller’s youthful plays were made known
to the English in translation in the last decade of the eighteenth
century.

It was therefore no wonder that Campbell should have followed
in the footsteps of his countrymen, and especially of his friend Scott,
and have exhibited a lively interest in Germany and German litera¬
ture. After the publication and great success of his first long,
didactic poem Pleasures of Hope in 1799 he planned to write one
on William Tell whose romantic story had already stirred his imagi¬
nation.2 In the Pleasures of Hope he places Tell at the side of
Bruce of Bannockburn, but as far as we know, he never carried
out his plan to extol in verse the deeds of this champion of Swiss
liberty. Still his interest in the struggles of this little republic re¬
mained alive for many years, as shown by the fact that more than
thirty years later he penned some lines on the heroic death of Arnold
of Winkelried, Tell’s compatriot, a subject, by the way, that inspired
Scott as well. According to tradition Winkelried won the battle of
Sempach, July 9th, 1386, by seizing several of the enemies’ lances
and directing them against his own breast. He thus created a gap
in the serried ranks of the opposing forces through which his com-

1 See Georg Herzfeld, William Taylor von Norwich , Halle, 1897, p. 8.

2 See William Beattie, Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, New York,
1850, I, 220. It may be well to state here that I have used this work
of Beattie s and Cyrus Redding’s Literary Reminiscences of Thomas Camp¬
bell, London, i860, as sources of information for the facts of Campbell’s
life and literary activity and take this occasion to acknowledge my indebted¬
ness to them instead of mentioning it in each individual instance.

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

235

panions penetrated. Inspired by the splendid monument in Stanz-
Unterwalden, commemorating this deed, Campbell wrote an ode
praising the sturdy independence of the Swiss which prompted them,
as he says “to force tyrannic hosts to bleed or flee.” He lauds
Winkelried above most of the heroes of the age of chivalry:

Heroes of chivalry ! whose banners grace
The aisles of many a consecrated place,

Confess how few of you can match in fame
The martyr Winkelried’s immortal name !

In the year 1800 the success of the Pleasures of Hope having given
him for the moment a fair competency, Campbell determined to
follow the well knowm advice of Goethe :

Wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muss ins Dichters Lande gehen !

With the idea of making the personal acquaintance of the German
authors whose works he so much admired he planned a trip to the
Continent. In a letter to his friend James Thomson under the
date of June first, 1800, he writes: “I shall see Schiller and Goethe,
the banks of the Rhine and the Mistress of Werter! But alas I
shall not find such a friend at Gottingen, as I found in Thomson at
Glasgow.” With his native diffidence he shrank from the stare of
strangers and from their ridicule of his broken German, but he felt
that the feeling of awkwardness and solitude would be more than
compensated for by the acquisition of another language and the
broadening of his horizon which would enable him to accept a posi¬
tion as a traveling tutor.

He was fortunate enough to obtain a letter of introduction to the
poet Klopstock, then in his 77th year, who was living in Hamburg
as diplomatic representative of Denmark. Campbell describes the
author of the Messias as a plain man of unpretending manner, great
mildness and apparent goodness of disposition. As Klopstock was
the first great name in the world of letters whose acquaintance Camp¬
bell was privileged to make, he was naturally flattered by Klopstock’s
kind reception and presented him with a copy of his Pleasures of
Hope. They were forced to use Latin as the medium of communi¬
cation, with which language Campbell tells us he made his way
tolerably well among the French and Germans and still better among
the Hungarians. Klopstock, as we know, wrote his Messias in

o-6 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

imitation of Milton, but Campbell, while acknowledging some re¬
semblance between the works of the two poets, saw nothing in the
person or the manner of the German to remind him of the unbend¬
ing and lofty ideal of the English bard. Campbell seems to have been
acquainted with Klopstock’s “Ode to the Lake of Zurich,” as he
mentions it as an excellent specimen of Klopstock’s style in lyric
writing and of the temper of the man. This judgment testifies to
Campbell’s keen powers of observation, for the note struck in this
ode in praise of nature, love, and friendship which dates from a
somewhat frivolous epoch of Klopstock’s life, is equally character¬
istic of the poet in later years. With all his extravagant religious
fervor Klopstock was not ascetically inclined and enjoyed even in
old age the good things of the world.

To this visit to Klopstock Campbell owed the inspiration for
his first poem written in Germany. It bears the title of “The Name
Unknown” and was an imitation of Klopstock, according to the
statement in the editions of his poems. The only possible poem of
Klopstock’s that could have occasioned Campbell’s lines is the elegy
“Die kiinftige Geliebte,” written in 1747. This poem enjoyed
great popularity and may easily have attracted Campbell’s atten¬
tion. The theme of both poems is similar. Klopstock’s ode ex¬
presses the poet's longing for his future love, who, he takes for
granted, is already living, but whom he does not know as yet. In
anguish of heart he exclaims :

Wo, wo such’ ich Dich auf ? Wo werd’ ich endlich dich finden?

Du, die meine Begier stark und unsterblich verlangt !

Campbell writes:

Prophetic pencil! wilt thou trace
A faithful image of the face,

Or wilt thou write the ‘Name Unknown’,

Ordained to bless my charmed soul,

And all my future fate control,

Unrivalled and alone?

but here the resemblance ceases. The German poet moans and
wails in extravagant sentimentality to the accompaniment of tears
and sighs to have his future love make herself known to him :

Sag’ es mit einem durchdringenden Ach, das meinem Ach gleicht,

Das aus innerster Brust Klage seufzet, und stirbt.

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

237

The English poet in keeping with the character of his nation is self-
contained and moderate in the expression of his feelings. Quietly
but with fervor he longs for the moment when :

My thrilling hand shall meet with thine,

And never, never part.

Klopstock’s poem is written in his favorite hexameter, while Camp¬
bell uses six line stanzas with four stresses to the line and the rhyme
scheme aabccb. It can scarcely be called an imitation, but an original
creation based merely on a similar thought.

Campbell’s reputation had already preceded him to Hamburg,
and he was the recipient of many honors and much hospitality on
the part of the English colony both there and in the attractive suburb
of Altona. In this latter place he made the acquaintance of more
than one literary celebrity. Here too, he seems to have become
enamoured of a beautiful Jewish girl who inspired him to write
an admirable poem, which, however, remained a fragment and prob¬
ably for that reason was not included in his published poems.1
Recognizing the impossibility of a union he regrets that they had
not been bom

In that remote and simple time,

When, shepherd swains, thy fathers past
From dreary wilds and deserts vast
To Judah’s happy clime.

My song upon the mountain rocks
Had echoed of thy rural charms,

And I had fed thy father’s flocks,

O Judith of the raven locks !

To win thee to my arms.

Our tent beside the murmur calm
Of Jordan’s grassy-vested shore,

Had sought the shadow of the palm,

And blest with Gilead’s holy balm
Our hospitable door.

At falling night, or ruby dawn,

Or yellow moonlight’s welcome cool,

With health and gladness we had drawn,

From silver fountains on the lawn,

Our pitchers brimming full.

1 It will be found in Cyrus Redding, Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs
of Th. Campbell, I, 52.

238

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

How sweet to us at sober hours
The bird of Salem wrould have sung,

In orange or in almond bowers,
f'resh with the bloom of many flowers,

Like thee, forever young!

But ah, my Love! thy fathers land
It sheds no more a spicy bloom,

Nor fills with fruit the reaper's hand,

But wide its silent wilds expand,

A desert and a tomb !

Yet, by the good and golden hours
That dawn’d those rosy fields among, —

By Zion’s palm-encircled towers,—

By Salem’s far forsaken bowers,

And long forgotten song,

* * * * *

It is an exquisite lyric, equally charming in thought and execu¬
tion. The imagery is delightfully oriental and there is a poetic
witchery about it that makes one regret, that for some reason the
poet never completed it.

It had been Campbell’s plan to visit Gottingen and Jena in order
to make the acquaintance of the writers of the German romantic
School. Both Schlegels had studied in Gottingen and Achim von
Arnim was at that time a student there. In Jena he hoped to meet
August Wilhelm Schlegel and at Weimar, the German Athens, to
become acquainted with Goethe and Schiller, Wieland and Herder.
However travel in Germany was at that time both difficult and
dangerous because of the war between France and Austria. The
French had conquered several Bavarian towns and the Upper Valley
of the Danube was under martial law. Campbell, therefore, after
leaving Hamburg seems to have proceeded directly to Regensburg,
or Ratisbon, as it was then called, on the Danube. Here there was
a monastery of Scotch monks under the leadership of the venerable
Abbot Arbuthnot. Under the latter’s protection and guidance
Campbell continued his studies of German and German literature,
which he had begun in Hamburg. The precise route he took on
leaving Hamburg is not known. Our only information on the sub¬
ject is contained in a letter to his friend Dr. Robert Anderson, dated

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

239

August 10th, 1800. In this he speaks of the journey as tedious but
not unpleasant, the salient features of the landscape being grain fields
and extensive forests of which the eye soon tired. On entering the
valley of the Heitsch on the Bavarian frontier the landscape sud¬
denly expanded into a broad and grassy glen ; under the radiance of
a full and beautiful moon it united all the wildness of a Scotch glen
with the verdure of an English garden. He writes that such en¬
chantment could not be surpassed in Tempi itself, and that he would
travel to the Walls of China to feel again the wonder and delight
with which he first surveyed this enchanting scene. Very graphic¬
ally he describes the horrors of war that prevailed at Regensburg,
“the richest fields of Europe,” as he says, “desolated by contending
troops ; peasants driven from their houses to starve and beg in the
streets ; horses dying of hunger and men dying of their wounds.”
At Regensburg he was a witness of a battle between the French and
Austrians which gave the former the possession of the city. Very
amusingly he describes his daily routine of study in a letter which
he writes to the poet Richardson, the author of the “Pleasures of
Memory,” a poem similar to Campbell’s own “Pleasures of Hope.”
“I rise at seven — thanks to the flies that forbid me to sleep— and,
after returning thanks to God for prolonging my miserable existence
at Ratisbon — I put on a pair of boots and pantaloons, and study
with open windows, and half naked, till ten o’clock. I then chew a
crust of bread and eat a plum for breakfast. At eleven my Parlez-
vous-Frangais steps in with his formal periwig, and still more formal
bow. I chatter a jargon of Latin and French to him — for he has
no English — and study again from twelve till one ; dine and read
English or Greek till two, and then take an afternoon nap. Under
a burning sun I then expose my feeble carcass in a walk around
the cursed walls, or traverse the wood where the Rothmantels or
‘Red-cloaks,’ and Hussars, amused us at cut-and-thrust , before the
city was taken. Sometimes I venture to the heights where the last
kick-up was seen, when the poor Austrians were driven across the
Danube.”

Differing from the monks of the Scotch monastery in politics, he
rarely visited them, because of the acrimonious discussions into
which they invariably fell. One of them denounced him as a rank
republican, and the others were more or less hostile to him. He re¬
tained, however, a lively recollection of the kindness of the worthy

240

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

abbot Dr. Arbuthnot and in one of his later poems, “The Ritter
Bann,” he gives us a sketch of his venerable friend:

There entered one whose face he knew, —

Whose voice, he was aware,

He oft at mass had listened to,

In the holy house of prayer.

’Twas the Abbot of St. James’s monks,

A fresh and fair old man :

His reverend air arrested even
The gloomy Ritter Bann.

Campbell remained in Regensburg until October, making fre¬
quent excursions into the beautiful regions along the Danube and
its tributaries. In a letter to Richardson he describes the scenery
with enthusiasm and relates how a deer, pursued by the hunters, flew
up the heights close to his path and took refuge in the rocks from
which neither search nor shouting could dislodge her. He chris¬
tened the place the Rock of Mercy : rupes misericordiae and wrote
some Latin lines upon the incident. No trace of these has been
found, but the event figures in a stanza of his poem “On Leaving
a Scene in Bavaria” :

Around thy savage hills of oak,

Around thy waters bright and blue,

No hunter’s horn the silence broke,

No dying shriek thine echo knew,'

But safe, sweet Eldurn woods, to you
The wounded wild deer ever ran,

Whose myrtle bound their grassy cave,

Whose very rocks a shelter gave
From blood-pursuing man.

This whole poem bears eloquent testimony to the beauty of the
landscape, and tne fondness which the woods of gigantic oak and
the bold and beautiful hills inspired in him. The following stanza
may serve as a sample of the many:

Yes ! I have loved thy wild abode,

Unknown, unploughed, untrodden shore;

Where scarce the woodman finds a road,

And scarce the fisher plies an oar;

For man’s neglect I love thee more;

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY 241

That art nor avarice intrude

To tame thy torrent’s thunder-shock,

Or prune thy vintage of the rock
Magnificently rude.

During the armistice agreed upon between Bavaria and Austria
September 28th, and which lasted forty-five days, Campbell made
several trips, on one of which he journeyed as far south as Munich.
Here the charming valley of the Iser inspired him, as it has others,
to write a “Drinking Song of Munich” 1 which shows him in one
of his happiest and most care-free moods :

Sweet Iser ! were thy sunny realm
And flowery gardens mine,

Thy waters I would shade with elm
To prop the tender vine;

My golden flagons I would fill
With rosy draughts from every hill;

And under every myrtle bower,

My gay companions should prolong
The laugh, the revel, and the song,

To many an idle hour.

Like rivers crimsoned with the beam
Of yonder planet bright,

Our balmy cups should ever stream
Profusion of delight;

No care should touch the mellow heart,

And sad or sober none depart;

For wine can triumph over wo,

And Love and Bacchus, brother powers,

Could build in Iser’s sunny bowers
A paradise below.

The horrifying spectacle of the battle around Regensburg and
the gruesome sight of the smoldering battle-field of Ingolstadt, which
he visited soon after the action, furnished him with the material
for his most inspired battle lyric “Hohenlinden,” in which his love
for the beauties of the Bavarian landscape is again apparent. No
German could have entered better into the spirit of the conflict, nor
have urged the Bavarians to charge with more stirring words than
did the English poet :

1 According to Beattie this poem is a translation from a German one,
but I have not been able, as yet, to discover the German original.

242 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The combat deepens. On, ye brave,

Who rush to glory, or the grave!

Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave,

And charge with all thy chivalry.1

Strangely enough Campbell thought but little of these occasional
lyrics, which we now consider his best work. Washington Irving
relates in his memoirs that in an interview with Scott the latter re¬
marked that Campbell did not seem to think much of the poem —

“d - d, drum and trumpet lines.” Scott in fact had great difficulty

in persuading his friend to read the poem to him, and it was only
Scott’s enthusiasm over it which finally induced Campbell to pub¬
lish it.

Another of Campbell’s best known and most popular poems
“The Soldier’s Dream” was likewise inspired by the warlike scenes
in Bavaria, which made such a deep impression on his sensitive
nature, that for years he could not think of them without a feeling
of horror.2

Another sentimental lyric suggested by one of the battles on the
Danube is “The Wounded Hussar,” which describes the finding of
the wounded soldier by his sweetheart and his death in her arms. It
was set to a familiar Scotch melody and became so popular that one
might almost call it a street ballad. Campbell was often teased in
good-natured fashion by his friend for being its author. Much of
Campbell’s poetry, we confess, impresses us today as too sentimental
and this accounts in part for the waning of interest in his verse;
nevertheless he had the knack of coining phrases which linger in the
memory and in some cases have become almost proverbial. How
many people using such expressions as : “Like angels visits few and
far between,” “ ’T is distance lends enchantment to the view,”
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” are aware that they
originated in Campbell’s fertile imagination and are quotations from
his poems?

Campbell is in the truest sense of the word a writer of occa¬
sional poetry, for wherever he happened to be he always found little

JIt was thought at first that Campbell was a witness of the battle of
Hohenlinden himself, but Beattie has shown conclusively that the poet left
Bavaria late in October and returned to Altona, where he resided till he left
for England, whereas the battle was not fought until December 3rd, about
six weeks after Campbell’s departure from Bavaria.

’This song was well translated into German by the Countess Purgstall
(nee Cranstoun).

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

243

incidents which inspired him to break forth into verse. Thus a Danish
inscription which he must have seen on a tomb either in Hamburg
or Altona, prompted him to write his poem entitled “Death of my
Only Son,” which was not included in his published works. The
inscription told of the death of a boy of nine years whose body was
placed in his mother’s tomb. The lines express in sympathetic fash¬
ion the grief of the father at his double loss. Similarly a crude
Latin song which he heard sung by the Hungarian soldiers when the
Austrian army was passing through Bavaria, and which was set to a
popular marching tune, entitled Landsohn’s March, inspired him to
transfer the Latin words into English verse under the caption “Land¬
sohn’s Attack.” It is quite martial in character and shows that
Campbell possessed the ability to enter into the feelings of other
nations and other times.1

It was in Hamburg and later in Altona that Campbell made the
acquaintance of several prominent Irishmen who had been exiled in
1798. Among them was Anthony MacCann, with whom he took
many walks along the banks of the Elbe. His feeling for their lone¬
liness in a strange land and their longing to return home is touchingly
described in one of his finest lyrics, “The Exile of Erin.” He very
effectively uses his own motto Erin go bragh, as a sort of refrain
running through the poem. The last stanza reads :

Yet all its sad recollections suppressing,

One dying wish my lone bosom can draw :

Erin ! an exile bequeaths thee his blessing !

Land of my forefathers ! Erin go bragh !

Buried and cold when my heart stills her motion,

Green be thy fields, — sweetest isle of the ocean !

And thy harp-striking bards sing aloud with devotion, —

Erin mavournin — Erin go bragh !

This poem, too, was translated into German and enjoyed considerable
popularity.

The long dark winter in Hamburg inspired him to write his “Ode
to Winter.” Composed before the cessation of hostilities between
the Austrians and French, the last stanza well reflects the author’s
interest in German affairs and his horror of warfare.

'It was not included in his published poems, but is given by Beattie, I,
281.

244

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

But chiefly spare, O king of clouds!

The sailor on his airy shrouds;

When wrecks and beacons strew the steep,

And spectres walk along the deep.

Milder yet thy snowy breezes
Pour on yonder tented shores,

Where the Rhine’s broad billow freezes,

Or the dark-brown Danube roars.

Oh, winds of winter ! list ye there
To many a deep and dying groan ;

Or start, ye demons of the midnight air,

At shrieks and thunders louder than your own.

Alas ! ev’n your unhallow’d breath
May spare the victim fallen low ;

But man will ask no truce to death, —

No bounds to human woe.

Everything was grist to his mill. Seeing one day the unclaimed
body of a suicide, exposed to the elements on the bank of a river,
he was prompted to write his finished ode “Lines on the Grave of a
Suicide,” which closes with Christ’s admonition : “Judge not !” :

Who may understand
Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown? —

He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.

Here, too, in Hamburg he seems to have become acquainted with
the Scandinavian legend which he incorporated in the somewhat
sombre but very effective poem “The Death-boat of Heligoland,”
which, as Beattie says, never achieved the popularity it really de¬
served. Most spirited is the description of the boat manned by the
ghostly oarsmen, plowing its way through the breakers of Heligo¬
land, bound from their graves in the west to their final resting place :

The foam of the Baltic had sparkled like fire,

And the red moon looked down with an aspect of ire;

But her beams on a sudden grew sick-like and gray.

And the mews that had slept clanged and shrieked far away —

And the buoys and the beacons extinguished their light,

As the boat of the stony-eyed dead came in sight,

High bounding from billow to billow ; each form
Had its shroud like a plaid flying loose to the storm ;

With an oar in each pulseless and icy-cold hand,

Fast they ploughed, by the lee-shore of Heligoland,

Such breakers as boat of the living ne’er crossed;

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

245

Now surf-sunk for minutes again they uptossed,

And with vivid lips shouted reply o’er the flood
To the challenging watchman that curdled his blood —

“We are dead — we are bound from our graves in the west,

First to Hecla, and then to - Unmeet was the rest

For man’s ear. The old abbey bell thundered its clang,

And their eyes gleamed with phosphorous light as it rang:

Ere they vanished, they stopped, and gazed silently grim,

Till the eye could define them, garb, feature and limb.

The war threatening between England and Russia, which was
a frequent topic of conversation among the British at Altona,
prompted Campbell to write his most inspired naval ode “Ye Mari¬
ners of England,” called by Saintsbury in his account of Campbell in
the Cambridge History of English Literature the most perfect of its
kind. It is a working over of an older ballad, “Ye Gentlemen of
England,” composed on the prospect of a Russian war. What Eng¬
lishman would not thrill on hearing the splendid stanzas ?

Ye Mariners of England!

That guard our native seas ;

Whose flag has braved a thousand years,

The battle and the breeze !

Your glorious standard launch again
To match another foe!

And sweep through the deep,

While the stormy winds do blow;

While the battle rages loud and long,

And the stormy winds do blow.

The spirits of your fathers
Shall start from every wave! —

For the deck it was their field of fame,

And Ocean was their grave :

Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell,

Your manly hearts shall glow,

As ye sweep through the deep,

While the stormy winds do blow ;

While the battle rages loud and long,

And the stormy winds do blow.

England was then engaged in fortifying the coast along the chan¬
nel with stone towers against a possible attack, but Campbell, with the
feeling of superiority so characteristic of Englishmen, sings :

246

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Britain needs no bulwarks,

No towers along the steep ;

Her march is o’er the mountain-waves,

Her home is on the deep.

The same martial spirit breathes in his other naval ballad, The
Battle of the Baltic,” not written till five years later, but describing
the victory of Nelson over the Danes in the same year. In its
original form it bore the title “The Battle of Copenhagen” and con¬
sisted of twenty-seven six-line stanzas, whereas in its present form it
contains eight stanzas of nine lines each. The note is not as inspired
as in the “Mariners of England,” but it rises to a fine climax in the
closing stanzas :

Now joy, Old England, raise!

For the tidings of thy might,

By the festal cities’ blaze,

Whilst the wine-cup shines in light;

And yet amidst that joy and uproar,

Let us think of them that sleep,

By thy wild and stormy steep,

Elsinore !

Brave hearts ! to Britain’s pride
Once so faithful and so true,

On the deck of fame that died ; —

With the gallant good Riou :

Soft sigh the winds of heaven o’er their grave !

While the billow mournful rolls
And the mermaid’s song condoles;

Singing glory to the souls
Of the brave ! —

Just what route Campbell pursued on his trip from Regensburg
to Hamburg is not known but, as Beattie conjectures, he probably
passed through Nuremburg, Weimar, Jena, Leipzig, Halle, Bruns¬
wick and perhaps Gottingen, Hanover and Liineburg, since he men¬
tions them in his letters. He had originally planned to make the
acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller, Wieland and Burger, but we
have no record of his having met any of them. Campbell was espe¬
cially fond of Wieland’s poetry. In one of his letters he writes; “I
cannot conceive a more perfect poet than their (the Germans)
favorite Wieland.” He did, however, make the acquaintance of
August Wilhelm Schlegel, probably at Jena, as the latter was at this

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

247

time still professor of literature at this university. This acquaintance¬
ship ripened into an intimate friendship. Whenever Schlegel visited
England he was the guest of Campbell, and the latter never failed
to visit Schlegel on his various trips to Germany. Cyrus Redding,
to whom Campbell introduced his friend Schlegel, well describes in
his “Reminiscences of Campbell’’ the character of Schlegel and the
difference between the two men : “Never were there two men more
dissimilar: August Schlegel was talkative upon every subject con¬
nected with literature and showed at times no small share of the
vanity of successful authorship. His friend Campbell was the
reverse of all this. There was about Schlegel a sort of petit maitre
bearing, assumed upon occasions, of which Campbell had not a trace.
There was also a great difference in their attitude toward politics.
Campbell was an ardent patriot, but nevertheless outspoken and
liberal in his political views, whereas Schlegel, as Redding points
out, had mingled too much among the despotic nobles of Germany
to talk politics or to find fault with the existing order of things.

Campbell was as much interested in German philosophy as he
was in German literature. When in Hamburg he devoted, as he
tells us, twelve successive weeks to the study of Kant, reading also
as a relaxation from these severer studies the poetry of Schiller,
Wieland and Burger. He fancied at first that Kant might be another
Bacon, but though his studies were guided by a disciple of Kant’s,
he found, he tells us, little to reward his labors. How little he
understood Kant’s philosophy is shown by his remark : “His meta¬
physics are mere innovations upon the received meanings of words,
and the coinage of new ones, and convey no more instruction than
the writings of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. In Belles
Lettres, the German language opens a richer field than in their
philosophy.”

On his visit to France in 1814 he had long disputes on German
philosophy with Schlegel who at that time w^as staying in Paris
with Mme. de Stael. He considered Schlegel exceedingly learned
and ingenious, but a visionary in German philosophy and by far too
mystical. The Scotch love of controversy in matters philosophical
is a marked trait of Campbell’s character. He tells us he fought
harder with Schlegel than with any other man, but always came
away in excellent humor. “The exercise of the mind with such a
one,” he writes, “is like an inspiring battle, and to battle we set

24S SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

the moment we meet.” They argued over the Scotch and English
philosophers whom Schlegel blamed for not aiming at the essence of
things and beginning with general principles. In this discussion
we have very clearly brought out the difference between the deductive
method of the Germans and the inductive method of the English, for,
as Campbell tried to show Schlegel, since the time of Bacon the
method pursued in England was to collect particular truths and then
combine them into general truths or conclusions. Campbell sums up
by calling Schlegel “a visionary and a Platonist. who believed that
the external universe was only a shadow or reflection of the inward
principle of mind.”

Campbell also quarreled with Schlegel in matters of art. The
English poet was enchanted with the glorious Apollo in the Louvre
and tells us that he would have knocked Dr. Schlegel down, had not
Mme. de Stael been present, when the German suggested that it
was inferior to the Torso. He calls the latter a vile Fuselesque
thing — it is human — the other is divine. “The more I see of the
works of art,” he continues, “and of Dr. Schlegel and his ideas of the
sublime and beautiful, the more I hate the Fuselesque, for Schlegel
and Fuseli 1 are both, I see, of the same school.” Still these differ¬
ences over philosophy and art did not disturb the growing friendship
between the two. Six years later on his visit to Germany in 1820 he
went to Bonn instead of Heidelberg, where the idea of “the great tun”
had charmed his fancy, because Schlegel was then professor of art
and literature at the university of the former place. Both recalled
with pleasure their delightful intercourse in Paris. Still his joy
at seeing his friend was a little dampened by the latter’s trick of
lecturing in conversation, which Campbell thought had increased with
his appointment, and by Schlegel’s ludicrous fondness of showing off
his English. Schlegel was very proud of his fluency and exactness in
speaking this language, but Campbell considered it in point of idiom
and pronunciation, what a respectable English parrot would be
ashamed of.2 He admired Schlegel, however, as a lecturer and fre-

1 Fuseli was a Swiss painter by birth, the name being originally Fiissli.
He was forced to flee to England in 1765 where he became a member of
the Royal Academy and in 1804 its Keeper.

J This may have been true enough of Schlegel’s pronunciation and fluency
m speaking English. But that his study and translation of Shakespeare’s
works had given him a more accurate knowledge of the English language
than even educated Englishmen possessed, is evidenced by the amusing ac-
count given by Redding of a dispute at a dinner party in England between
Schlegel and a number of Englishmen, including Campbell, as to whether

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

249

quently attended the latter’s lectures. He speaks of Schlegel’s
eloquence and of the fact that his students seemed to be in raptures
over him.

This friendship with Schlegel continued unabated till 1836 when
Campbell complained to Redding of the coldness of his friend and
considered him changed. Redding believed this coldness to be
nothing but the natural weakening of the warmth of feeling found
in men as they grow older, which was nature’s way of preparing for
the final separation by lessening the strength of the tie to the imagina¬
tion in order to deaden the pain of parting.

Campbell seems to have thought at one time of making a transla¬
tion of the Edda. At any rate in a letter dated January 23rd, 1806,
he says that he is extremely obliged to Mr. Wolff for his hint
respecting the Edda, but that he is at present in no state to turn
his attention to any avocation so important. When he has more
leisure, he hopes that Mr. Wolff will direct him in the choice of
proper matter for translation.1

Campbell is said to have been much impressed with the Romantic
School of Germany. Naturally his friendship with the Schlegels
must have brought him in close contact with their theories and their
style of writing, but whether this was the source of his inspiration
for his long romantic poem, “Gertrude of Wyoming,” is uncertain.
What can be said in favor of this theory has been adduced by
Beattie.2 He relates that in 1806 when Campbell made his first
sketch of “Gertrude of Wyoming” he had thought of making some
translations from the German and had requested Scott to favor
him with a list of German works. What these works were we have
no means of knowing, but a friend of Beattie’s, Mr. William Smith,
suggested that Campbell had obtained the first idea for his poem from
a novel by August Lafontaine entitled Bameck und Saldorf, which
had appeared in Berlin, 1804. Since 1791 Lafontaine, who was by

the words ‘hurrah’ and ‘huzza’ were as old as Shakespeare, or were later
importations. Schlegel denied that they were to be found in Shakespeare,
whose vocabulary, he said, he knew by heart. Schlegel was right and the
Englishmen were wrong, for both words seem to have been introduced at a
later date.

1Who this Mr. Wolff was I am not certain, but may have been the well-
known German philologian Friedrich August Wolff whose “Prolegomena ad
Homerum” had produced such a sensation on its appearance in 1795 and
marks a new epoch in the study of ancient epic poetry. As far as I know,
Campbell never carried out his intention.

2 Beattie, I, 454.

250 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

profession an army chaplain, had been writing one sentimental novel
after another. These achieved great popularity in Germany, delight¬
ing all classes from the peasant to the king. They are characterized
by the same sentimentality employed by Clauren, but without the
erotic and suggestive elements for which the latter is notorious. It
is of course not impossible that the novel Barneck und Saldorf, which
had appeared just two years before the first inception of Campbell’s
poem might have been included in the list sent by Scott to his friend.
Beattie considers the coincidences, as he calls them, between the
English poem and the German novel sufficiently striking to warrant
this conjecture. In an appendix to the second volume of his Life
and Letters of Campbell he reprints two pages from the beginning
of Lafontaine’s novel. I have not been able to obtain access to the
German work and am dependent upon the extract given by Beattie,
but as he states that this is the only part of the novel bearing any
resemblance to Campbell’s poem we can form our judgment suffi¬
ciently well from this. To my mind the resemblance is very slight.
The German novel tells the story of a group of German colonists
living not far from the banks of the Hudson, while the scene of
Campbell’s poem is laid in the beautiful Wyoming Valley in the
mountains of Pennsylvania. In the German tale the mother is a
delicate, frail woman whose health has been undermined by the
necessity of doing all the work of the house alone. One morning
the rumor reaches them that the English are approaching from the
sea. They plan to flee to the Alleghenies, but are suddenly attacked
by savages who kill both father and mother. In dying the latter
entrusts her little son to the care of a German officer who had sud¬
denly appeared on the spot and had called to the savages to desist.
Turning to the boy and placing his hand on the latter’s head the
officer says: “Von jetzt an bin ich dein Vater.” Campbell’s poem,
on the other hand, is based on accounts of the Wyoming massacre
given in the popular English histories of the day. The family is
English not German; the mother is already dead; the only child is
not a boy but a girl. Suddenly one summer an Indian approaches
bringing with him a white boy whom he had rescued from the
Hurons in Michigan. The father was a captain of the British force
and the mother had pined away and died despite the best of care.
On her deathbed she begged the Indian chieftain to have the
orphaned boy taken back to his native shore of England. This boy

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

251

is now brought up by Gertrude’s father, but when grown leaves
them in search of adventure and returns after many years to claim
Gertrude as his bride. For three short months they live happily till
the Indians, led by their chieftain Brandt, slay both father and
daughter, leaving the husband and his foster father to mourn alone.

From this brief account of Campbell’s poem I think it will be
evident that the only resemblance to Lafontaine’s novel is that in
each case there is a boy whose parents had been slain by the Indians,
and who is entrusted to the care of others. Such things were of
daily occurrence in the early period of American history and Camp¬
bell needed no suggestion from a German novel, where the circum¬
stances moreover are totally different, to invent the episode for his
own poem, which, as we have seen, was based on an account of the
Wyoming massacre. Campbell was interested in French as well as
German literature and probably had read St. Pierre’s romance Paul
et Virginie and Chateaubriand’s Atala with the romantic sentimental¬
ity of which his poem strikingly agrees.1 Whether the poem was
inspired solely by Chateaubriand’s tale or was based in part on a
German novel, as Beattie thinks, at any rate it is written in the
sentimental style so popular in that period and added considerably to
the reputation of the poet. An article that appeared in the Edin¬
burgh Review in 1809, the year of the publication of the poem,
compared it to the finer parts of Spenser and spoke of its having
the pitch of Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence.” The writer of the
article believed it to approach his conception of pure and perfect
poetry. Beattie, writing in 1848, nearly forty years later, is equally
lavish in his praise and adds that the judgment thus pronounced on
the genius and influence of Campbell’s poetry has never been re¬
versed. Its reception in America was equally cordial and flattering.
One writer speaks of passages of exquisite grace and tenderness and
of others of spirit and grandeur. It was the period of the belief
in the nobility of the savages, which had been dominating literature
since the time of Rousseau. Therefore Campbell’s delineation of

‘A recent article by Albert M. Bierstadt, JEGP, XXI, 491-501, raises this
surmise to a certainty. The writer has convincingly shown that Campbell
borrowed many details from Atala, including the name of the Indian Outa-
lissi, which in Chateaubriand’s work is borne by Chacta’s father. Bierstadt,
too, thinks that the German novel furnished Campbell with very little ma¬
terial, at most with the idea of a massacre of Europeans by Indians. But
surely Campbell did not need a German novel to acquaint him with what
was unfortunately a common incident in the life of the colonists.

252 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

the noble Indian Outalissi, a mixture of stoicism and magnanimity,
was considered to be a classic. Campbell here struck a note which
James Fenimore Cooper was to take up nearly twenty years later
and through his novels to make the whole world acquainted with the
primeval forests of America and the noble Red Man. No less a man
than Sir Walter Scott thought highly of “Gertrude of Wyoming”
and recited with great delight some extracts of it to Washington
Irving. He regretted that Campbell did not write oftener and give
full sweep to his genius.

Germany seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Campbell.
In the years following his visit of 1814 we find him frequently
planning to visit it again. At length, having become partially inde¬
pendent through a legacy from a Highland cousin, he was able in
1820 to indulge his desire and to revisit his German friends, espe¬
cially Schlegel. Campbell was engaged at this time in preparing two
volumes of lectures on Greek, Roman, French, Spanish and German
literatures and planned to pass some time at Bonn and Heidelberg
working in the libraries. It was at Bonn that he first obtained his
idea of a University of London, which he was later instrumental in
founding. In a letter to his friend Richardson under the date of
March 27th, he emphasizes the value of friendship, quoting a German
poem as an illustration, which I reproduce just as it is given by
Beattie :

Arbeit brennt die Sterne feucht,
Freundschaft macht die Biirde leicht ;
Mit dem Freunde, hand im hand,
Bauet Man ein wiister land.

Campbell was delighted with his visit to the Rhine and in his
letters waxes eloquent over the beauties of the Seven Mountains and
the Drachenfels. Just as his stay in Bavaria twenty years before
had inspired him to write poems on German scenes, so his journey
along the Rhine led to his poem “Brave Roland,” which he wrote
on the day of his visit to Rolandseck. It narrates the familiar tale
of Charlemagne’s palladin whose sweetheart thinking he had died
on a crusade to the Holy Land, retired to the convent on the island
of Nonnenwerth. Unable to forget her, Roland built a tower on a
promontory from which he could gaze down on the walls within

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

253

which his love lay hidden. It is written in ballad form and is a
fair sample of his verse, though it does not compare with some of
his earlier work.

While at Bonn Campbell had the pleasure of making the acquaint¬
ance of the German patriot Ernst Moritz Arndt, whose songs had
so inspired the soldiers of the War of Liberation and who since
1818 had been professor of history at Bonn. For some reason Camp¬
bell had been prejudiced against Arndt, thinking his character hard
and stern. He found him, however, dressed as a peasant and, with
his fiery dark eyes, bearing a striking resemblance to Robert Burns.
Arndt responded so simply and cordially to Campbell’s formal bow
that the latter laid aside his formal air and passed several delightful
hours under the poet’s hospitable roof. He found Arndt’s conversa¬
tion original, although at times slightly dogmatic and thought that
his poems strongly resembled those of Burns. After his return from
Vienna, where he spent the months of August and September, Camp¬
bell passed another month among his dear friends of the university,
as he calls them, when suddenly they were thrown into consternation
by the unexpected suspension of Arndt and Welcher 1 from their
professorships. On his return to England Campbell mentions the
fact in a letter to Mrs. Fletcher, remarking that Arndt’s only crime
was his having reminded the king of his promise to give the people a
constitution. He describes Arndt as a man all made of heart and
truth, eloquent and energetic as a man and simple as a child. He
fears that Arndt is already in a dungeon.2

How well Campbell knew German it is hard to say. When he
went to Bonn he had difficulty in understanding Schlegel’s lectures.
The German poem on Friendship which he quoted in his letter to
Richardson before sailing for Germany is full of grammatical mis¬
takes, if Beattie’s reprint of it is correct. He took German lessons
in Bonn and later in Frankfort where his teacher, a Scottish monk
by the name of Ingram, stated that Campbell tried to overcome the
difficulties of German by dint of Greek, finding out points of resem¬
blance between the two languages. Ingram considered him to be
the most attentive, zealous and intelligent pupil he had ever met

1 Professor of Greek at Bonn, also intimate with Campbell.

3 Arndt was suspended in November, 1820, his papers having been already
confiscated September, 1819, and placed on trial. Though not convicted he
was permanently dismissed from office, but with full salary.

254 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

with. On his trip down the Danube to Vienna he resorted to Latin
in order to converse with the German monks on the boat. He writes
to a friend on his arrival : “I have been talking Latin so long that
I have hardly English enough left to tell you of my arrival in
Vienna.” He certainly was not enamored of the German language,
for we find him writing in a letter of September 29th from Vienna
that he had seen but not enjoyed the Comedies and Tragedies of
Vienna, adding: “They have good actors, but in any case the dis¬
cord of the language defies all power of graceful recitation. It
would be interesting to know just what plays Campbell saw while in
Vienna, probably among the comedies those of Kotzebue, who had
been killed just a year before and who had enjoyed unbounded popu¬
larity as a writer of light dramas. Among the tragedies he may
have seen Grillparzer’s Ahnfrau, which had appeared in 1817, or his
Sappho , which was first performed in 1819, the year before Camp¬
bell’s visit. It is to be doubted whether Campbell understood enough
German to appreciate the beauties of any drama given in that lan¬
guage. At any rate when in Berlin in 1824 he found Schiller’s
Maria Stuart so dull that he could hardly sit it out, though the
principal actress, Frau Stuck, appeared to him lively and interesting.
It hardly seems credible that a play as dramatic and as beautiful as
this should not have appealed to a man of Campbell’s literary taste,
had he been able to follow it intelligently.

Campbell’s fame as a poet preceded him to Vienna. His arrival
was announced in one of the leading journals by an article which
referred in complimentary vein to his poems and to the fact that
he was engaged in a great work of general literary interest. It
concluded with a translation of his naval ode “Ye Mariners of Eng¬
land” by a Jewish scholar named Cohen. As we learn from one
of Campbell’s letters an Oriental scholar by the name of Von Ham¬
mer, whom he met, translated his “Lines on a Scene in Argyllshire.”
His “Exile of Erin” had been translated ten years previously. He
had also the pleasure while in Vienna of dining with the Danish
translator of his “Pleasures of Hope.”

In Vienna Campbell met a Polish lady, Countess R - ski, a

brilliantly educated woman whose house was the meeting place of
the best Viennese society. A day spent in her company on the
mountains along the Danube inspired him to write a poem of five
stanzas on the scene. This he sent her as a small return for her

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

255

hospitality.1 On his return from Germany to England Campbell
busied himself with finishing and publishing his Lectures on Classic
Poetry for which he had been gathering material while abroad. Ac¬
cording to Beattie the published form when compared with the
original manuscript, shows many evidences of the success with which
he had pursued his researches in Germany.

During his stay in Germany in 1820 he seems to have become
acquainted with the story which served as his inspiration for his
epic poem “Theodoric,” which he entitled a Domestic Tale. It was
written, however, after his return and not published till 1824. Of all
his longer poems this is probably the weakest. The subject is
extremely sentimental and the thought is often expressed in very
trivial phrases. Nevertheless the poet was offended at the indiffer¬
ence of the general public and the coldness of his friends, believing
their criticisms unfair. Time has proved that his friends were right
and the author wrong. Here and there we find a prettily turned
phrase which might partially justify Beattie’s remark that it con¬
tained beauties which, had he given the world nothing more, would
have insured him a name and reputation among poets. But on the
whole it is a very mediocre composition. Such lines as :

And home, a blank without her, gave him pain
seem positively ridiculous.

Ever since Campbell’s return from Germany in 1820 the idea
of a great university in London had been constantly in his mind. As
the matter met with more and more approval and gradually took
shape he determined in 1824 to go abroad again, this time to Berlin,
to study the German university system and the arrangement of the
university buildings, with a view to ascertaining how well suited they
were to the needs of his projected institution. It was the same
thought that impelled Benjamin Franklin to visit Gottingen when
contemplating the founding of the University of Pennsylvania and
which led at a later date to the modeling of Johns Hopkins and the
University of Michigan along German lines. In Hamburg he
renewed his acquaintanceship with the “exile of Erin’’ (Anthony
MacCann), whom he had known twenty-four years before as a
pale, slender youth and whom he now found as one of the wealthiest

1 The poem was not included in his published works but may be found
in Beattie, II, 126.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

256

and most respected citizens of Hamburg, having married a rich
widow of Altona. Fleeing from Hamburg to escape the many
invitations showered upon him, Campbell proceeded slowly on his
journey to Berlin through the sandy wastes of the Province of
Brandenburg. He found the university, established in 1810, an
admirable building, originally the palace of Prince Henry, the brother
of Frederick the Great— “just such a building,” he writes, “as I
would wish for the London one.”

An English medical student by the name of E. J. Spry, who with
a friend Coulson, showed the poet much attention, describes him as
being at times in very buoyant spirits, trying to persuade himself
that he was young enough to live over again the student life he once
enjoyed in the South of Germany, various anecdotes of which he
delighted to narrate. His physical powers, however, were not equal
to the task, nor did he attend any of the “levees” of the leading pro¬
fessors. “The literati of Berlin,” Spry continues, “evinced consid¬
erable curiosity to see and be introduced to the author of the
‘Pleasures of Hope,’ but they all appeared to share the surprise
experienced by myself at his decrepit appearance.” Who these
“literati” were we are not told. Among them was probably Adalbert
von Chamisso, the author of the fantastic tale Peter Schlemihl, who
since 1819 had been living in Berlin as Custodian of the Botanical
Garden, perhaps also Achim von Amim, the well known Romanticist,
who since 1810 had been living alternately in Berlin and on his
estate Wiepersdorf in the Mark, less than fifty miles from Berlin.

During the next eight years Campbell was greatly preoccupied
with his cares as rector of the University of Glasgow, by the sadness
caused by the death of his wife and brother and by his own pre¬
carious health. Still he followed with lively interest the fortunes of
the Continent. In a letter, dated March nth, 1831, he deplores
the taking of Warsaw by the Austrians and the butchery and the
horror of the scene. He writes that he is “sick and fevered with
indignation at Germany for suffering this foolish Emperor of
Austria.” He anticipates that Russia will enslave all Continental
Europe. France and Austria,” he continues, “will worry each other
till they are exhausted, and then down will come Russia on all the
south of Europe, with millions and millions, and give law and the
knout to Germany and France.” These feelings of the poet at the
despoiling of Poland by its neighbors are eloquently expressed in a

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

257

poem of 1832, entitled “Lines on Poland.” In it he deplores the
helplessness of England :

Who hates, but dares not chide, th’ Imperial Thief.

He waxes indignant at France and Germany:

France with her soul beneath a Bourbon’s thrall,

And Germany that has no soul at all —

The callous indifference of Germany is especially abhorrent to his
fiery spirit :

Germans, ye view its horror and disgrace
With cold phosphoric eyes and phlegm of face.

Is Allemagne profound in science, lore,

And minstrel art ? — her shame is but the more
To doze and dream by governments oppressed,

The spirit of a book-worm in each breast.

Well can ye mouth fair Freedom’s classic line,

And talk of constitutions o’er your wine:

But all your vows to break the tyrant’s yoke
Expire in Bacchanalian song and smoke :

Heavens ! can no ray of foresight pierce the lead
And mystic metaphysics of your heads,

To show the self-same grave, Oppression delves
For Poland’s rights, is yawning for yourselves !

He calls upon his own country to rise and put a stop to the

Oppression, that has belted half the globe —

This darkness combating with light.

To my mind it is one of the best of Campbell’s poems, fervent
and spirited, with none of the trivial lines which mar so much of his
verse. It proves that the poet who was an eloquent speaker could
pen impassioned lines when properly inspired.

Campbell’s interest in Poland led finally to the forming of a
Polish Association to support the Polish poet Niemciewitz and other
Polish exiles. We learn from a letter of March 7th, 1832, that the
Germans, too, were in a highly excited state, that their patriots had
formed similar associations. This prompted the poet to write his
“Ode to the Germans.” As originally planned, he intended to call
on the Germans to rise and assist the Poles, as is evident from a
letter to his sister Mary, June 7th, 1832. In the form in which it

258 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

appears in his printed works no mention is made of the Poles, but
the Germans are urged to rise and “burst the Tyrant’s chain of their
own country. While not as inspired as the ode to the Poles, neverthe¬
less it is quite spirited and well deserved the popularity which it
achieved in Germany where it was set to music and widely circulated
in a German translation. The first stanza of the ode runs :

The Spirit of Britannia
Invokes across the main,

Her sister AHemania
To burst the Tyrant’s chain:

By our kindred blood, she cries,

Rise, AHemania, rise,

And hallowed thrice the band
Of our kindred hearts shall be,

When your land shall be the land
Of the free — of the free !

Campbell’s interest in the Polish and the German situations which,
as he writes, are different and yet the same, led him to assume
the heavy responsibility of the correspondence of the Association.
He tells us that he had letters in French, German and even Latin
to write (the latter with the Hungarians) and that it engrossed
very much of his time and was anything but a sinecure. In April
of 1832 he presided at a meeting of the friends of Germany which
he describes as being most successful. At a subsequent meeting of
the Germans in London he was given a vote of thanks as the first
who had taken up the cause of German liberty in England. A little
later an address signed by six hundred citizens of Frankfurt and
Hanau, was presented to him by a deputation of Germans in London.
Many of these German patriots were fined and imprisoned for sign¬
ing the address. A little lyric, sent to Beattie on January 19th, 1834,
as a motto for the latter’s work “Switzerland Illustrated,” testifies
to his continued interest in the cause of German liberty :

The Switzer’s land ! where glory is encamped,

Impregnably, in mountain tents of snow;

Realms, that by human foot-print ne’er were stamped —

Where th’ eagle wheels, and glacial ramparts glow !

Seek, Nature’s worshipper, those landscapes ! Go
Where all her fiercest, fairest, charms are joined:

Go to the land where Tell drew Freedom’s bow!

And in the Patriot’s Country thou shalt find

A semblance ’twixt the scene and his immortal mind !

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY

259

Otherwise the summer of 1834 and the winter and spring of 1835
were devoted to a trip to France and Algiers which led Campbell’s
thoughts far away from Germany and its literature. Two years
pass before we hear of anything in the poet’s life touching on
German things; then we learn that he is planning to edit a life of
Frederick the Great. This resolve, his biographer thinks, was due
to his having seen a humorous piece in Queen’s Theatre in which
Frederick was ridiculed in good natured fashion. During the ensuing
years Campbell was busy with various literary projects, such as
editing a life of Shakespeare and writing a life of Petrarch. This
latter he found a prodigious piece of work which he did not com¬
plete till the close of 1840. In the summer of 1841 his health being
very unsatisfactory, his thoughts turned once more to Germany and
he resolved to proceed to the Rhine to take baths for his rheumatism.
His letters of this period are full of descriptions of the castles along
the banks of the famous river, of the gustatorial capacity of the
Germans and their consequent obesity, of the naive familiarity of
German servants, of the beauty of the German children, which, how¬
ever, he does not consider equal to that of English children. We
hear that he is working hard to get up his German which had
grown quite rusty in his years of absence, and that he was getting
on famously. He jocosely fears that he will return speaking broken
English. Again his stay in Germany furnishes him with the
inspiration for a new poem. One day he read in a newspaper of
Wiesbaden an anecdote recounting how a female deer had cared
for a lost child. This incident prompted him to write his poem
“Child and Hind.” The theme is an old one and occurs in legendary
lore in various forms from the mythical Romulus and Remus down
through the story of Queen Genoveva in honor of whom a chapel
had been erected in the mountains near where he was staying.
Campbell’s poem, however, is based on a real incident which occurred
on Ascension Day, May 24th, 1838. It had already been narrated
in a German ballad of sixty stanzas “Das verlorne Kind oder der
Schutzgeist” by G. Ph. Roth, which begins as follows:

Zu Wiesbaden unfern des Taunus Hohen
Hat sich die Sitte aufbewahrt,

In Scharen nach dem Wald zu gehen
Am Feste Christi Himmelfahrt:

Um dort mit Schmausen, Scherz, und Lachen
Sich einen frohen Tag zu machen.

26o schelling anniversary papers

Campbell does not mention the German ballad and it is doubtful
if he had seen it; there is no resemblance between the two poems,
save that both narrate the same event. In a prefatory note Camp¬
bell tells us that he was shown the very tree under which the boy
was found sleeping with a bunch of flowers in his hand. The poem
is quite mediocre and gives evidence of the poet’s waning powers.
He must have felt this himself, for we find him writing in a letter
to his friend Beattie, under the date of August 30th : “As mothers
dote the more fondly on their rickety children, so verse-makers
always think their worst verses their best, and as I like this last-born
very much, so it is in all likelihood a silly thing.” He feels that the
subject baffles poetry to make the story. He tells us that he strove
against rhyming, but that the story haunted him and he could not
help himself and hopes that if he has not painted the rose, he has
not totally blighted it.

Campbell’s stay in Germany did not cure him permanently of his
ailment and two years later we find him once more on the Con¬
tinent, this Erne at Boulogne sur Mer. The climate of the French
watering place did not agree with the poet. He grew steadily
worse, but lingered on during the winter and spring of 1844 and
finally breathed his last on Saturday, June 15th. A simple funeral
was held in Boulogne and the body sealed in a coffin with the seal
of the town, until it was laid in its last resting place in the Poet’s
Corner in Westminster Abbey with a ceremonial more elaborate, and.
attended by more distinguished Englishmen than had been the
case with any literary man since the obsequies of Addison, just
twenty-five years before.

From this review of Campbell’s interest in Germany and German
literature it will be evident, I think, that while he was an admirer
of German poetry it did not influence him in the sense in which it
had influenced Scott who began his literary work with translations
from the German and whose epic poems and novels owe much of
their inspiration to the German past. In fact he writes very indig¬
nantly in a letter of December 26th, 1822, concerning a proposition
that had been made to him to translate German war songs : “Con¬
found them I say! Set me to the rhapsodies of German poetry?”
Campbell seems to have been more interested in the authors them¬
selves than in their works. The only poem written in acknowledged
imitation of a German author is “The Name Unknown” which, as

THOMAS CAMPBELL AND GERMANY 261

we have seen, was inspired by a poem of Klopstock’s, but which
bears after all but little resemblance to the German poem. We have
seen that German history and German folk-lore provided him with
many of the subjects of his poems, but he worked them up in a
style that is distinctly English and not German. Whether he is
writing a poem dealing with Scotland or with Germany the style is
the same. Save for the subject matter one would scarcely suspect
that any of them owed their inspiration to Germany. Nevertheless
it does happen that while his long didactic and romantic poems on
which his reputation was originally based have been largely for¬
gotten, the little lyric poems which he thought of no importance i
his naval odes, the battle lyric of Hohenlinden, the beautiful, though
somewhat sentimental “Soldier’s Dream,” most of which he wrote
during his frequent sojourns in Germany, are the things for which
Campbell will really be remembered.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS IN ENGLAND
DURING THE i6th AND 17TH CENTURIES

Arthur B. Stonex

College Department, Charles Scribner’s Sons

MONEY lending, for however reasonable a return, was of
doubtful legality and of questionable morality in England
far into the 17th century, and money-lenders were regarded
with suspicion or scorn or with bitter hatred. A knowledge of these
facts is necessary for a full understanding of much of the economic
and social history of the time and of a surprisingly large amount of
the literature of every sort.

Much of the dislike or positive hatred of any gain for the lending
of money, common apparently to all peoples and in all times, has
been due to the fact that the borrower has characteristically been
one in distress whose misfortune alone makes the profit of the lender
possible. The money-lender thus seems to take an unfair advantage
of one at his mercy. The lender seems also to contribute little if
anything — such as strength or skill — for which he should be paid.
Before the development of modern business practices, most loans
were in all probability for “necessitous consumption” ; and the loans
probably did not often involve loss or even appreciable sacrifice to
the lenders. We can understand and sympathize with the ancient
and medieval hostility toward the lender’s gain if we think of the
present-day loan-shark and his victims, and of our attitude toward
both.

To Christians, the usurer’s gains were peculiarly hateful, for they
were repugnant to the essential doctrine and spirit of the New
Testament, and were apparently in clear violation of the many
specific prohibitions of usury in any form or amount to be found
throughout the Old Testament, such as Exodus, XXII, 25; Levit.
XXV, 35, 36, 37; Deut. XXIV, 19, 20; Ezek. XVIII, 13, and XXII,
12; Psalm XVI, and Prov., XXVIII, 8.

These prohibitions, formulated in the laws of the Church during
the Middle Ages, became part of the Civil Law in most of the

263

264 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

nations of Europe. English legislation against usury, by which was
meant gain of any sort or amount for the use of money, is recorded
as early as the reign of Alfred (2 Roll. Abr. 800), and there is record
of repeated legislation of the kind from this date down to the
period beginning with 1545.1

From “An Act Against Usury’’ of 1545 (37 Hen. VIII, c. 9)
the illegality of at least a moderate rate of interest becomes less
certain. This act seems almost certainly to have permitted ten per
centum. Seven years later, however, Parliament repealed the Act
of 1545, and expressly prohibited “anny manner of Usurie encreace
lucre gayne or interest to be had recevyed or hoped for.” ( Statutes
of the Realm, Vol. IV, pt. I, p. 155). This Act was in turn re¬
pealed in 1571 by an act called “An Acte agaynst Usurie” (13 Eliz.
c. 8) which nevertheless may have sanctioned ten per centum. There
has been much dispute as to the exact meaning of this law; the
present writer believes it is a characteristic bit of English compromise
that really permitted ten per centum by prohibiting it with penalties
so slight as to form no deterrent. Much heavier penalties were
imposed against higher rates. This interpretation of the Act is in
line with the interesting and often amusing debate that preceded
its passage in the House of Commons.2

The Statute of 1623-1624 (21 Jac. I, c. 17), although also entitled
“An Acte agaynst Usury,” unquestionably did legalize eight per
centum , but cautiously provided that “no Words in this Law con-
tayned shalbe construed to allow the practice of Usurie in point of
Religion and Conscience.”

Whatever the precise legal status of interest throughout the
eighty years from 1545 to 1624, there is no question as to the
ecclesiastical and popular disapproval of it; and there is also no

1 See Georg Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, I, 547-564 ; W. J. Ashley,
An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, I, 159 et seq. See
also Statutes of the Realm. 15 Edw. Ill, St. I., c. 5; 3 Hen. VII, c. 6 (7) ;
ands 11 Hen. VII, c. 6 and 8.

* The Journals of all the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Eliza¬
beth. Simonds D’Ewes, London edition of 1682, p. 171 et seq. See particu¬
larly the speeches by Mr. Bell and Sergeant Lovelace. The above interpre¬
tation of the statute is given by several contemporary writers but, among
later commentators, only by Mark Ord in An Essay on the Law of Usury,
third Ed., London, 1808, p. 36 and pp. 149-150. Confusion regarding the
meaning of the law has been due in part to the persistence of later scholars
in ignoring or actually deleting one or more “nots” in the original act. See,
for example, Plowden on Usury, p. 137, footnote, and Ashley, ut supra II’
488, note 268.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 265

question as to the persistence of the practice at both moderate and
extortionate rates, and of an increasing number and variety of
practitioners. We know most about the least worthy of these, and
least about those who in popular esteem and economic function and
importance corresponded to and prepared the way for the bankers
of today. In fact, the early history of what we would call banking,
in England, is not at all clear.

Cunningham is not willing to accept the origin of deposit banking
which is given by the writer of a curious old tract, The Mystery of
the New Fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers, etc., who declared, in
1676, that “almost Thirty years since” the goldsmiths had begun the
practice of accepting deposits and, later, paying interest on them and
lending money to merchants and others at higher rates.1 Cunning¬
ham believes there must have been some such banking system earlier,
but he gives no earlier example.2

The article on Banks and Banking in the Eleventh edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica says that goldsmiths “took deposits from
the time of James I onwards, and thus established deposit banking
as early as that reign.” However, the pamphlet just referred to
seems to be the only authority for the statement, and that pamphlet
definitely sets the date at about 1646. It seems doubtful, indeed, if
any such institution as the banks of Venice and Antwerp existed
before the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Bacon in his
essay Of Usury, which first appeared in 1625, recommends that “there
be certain persons licensed to lend to known merchants upon usury
. . . (but) Let it be no bank or common stock . . . ; not that I
altogether mislike banks, but they will hardly be brooked, in regard
to certain suspicions.” John Benbrigge’s Usura Accomodata, or A
Ready Way to Rectihe Usury of 1646, would seem to make equally
clear that no bank existed in England at least as late as that date,
for Benbrigge’s tract is itself a proposal for a banking system, a
“bank of piety” for the poor, and a “bank of trade.”

Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that an approximation of
our banking system existed in England long before 1646. There are
apparently clear references to a “bank” as early as 1604 and 1605.
Middleton in his Blacke Booke of 1604, says, of a “usurer,” “his only

1 J. B. Martin, The Grasshopper in Lombard Street, London, 1892, reprint,
pp. 285-392.

’William Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce,
3rd ed., II, 142.

266

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

recreation was but to hop about the Bourse before twelve to hear
what news from the Bank.” 1 The reference here seems to be to
some institution closely analogous to our banks and certainly to some
London institution.2 Just what is referred to, however, is not clear.
The phrase “in bank” referring apparently to a practice of deposit¬
ing money and receiving interest for it, occurs still earlier. Edward
Hake, who published a second edition of his Newes out of Paules
Churchyarde in 1579, and who says that edition contained no “other
whole Satyr” not found in the edition of 1567, though it contained
enlargements “here and there ... in many places,” declares that
wealthy “country Gentlemen” by racking rents and letting out their
lands raised large “sumes of coine” :

which gotte once
is straight to London brought
To bring increase, (O hellish trade)
and thus the meanes are wrought.

In bancke is layde the mightie Masse;
the gaine whereof may bee
Enough to maintaine them at ease.’

The Civilian declares in Wilson’s Discourse that “bishops and
priestes” put “their owne money secretly in bank, for the same
gayn,” i.e. usury.4 The reference here may, of course, be to a conti¬
nental practice; earlier Wilson speaks of the custom of lending gold

1 Middleton’s Works, ed. Bullen, VIII, 28-29.

a Bishop Hall in the fifth of his Byting Satires, which appeared first in
*599. says of the heir of a usurer:

. . he the bankes hath broke
And needs mote now some further playne o’erlooke.”

(Page 83 of his Satires and Other Poems, edited by P. H., 1838, London.)
Here, however, the reference may be to the gambling term. (See the New
Eng. Dictionary.)

Volpone in Jonson s play of that name, first performed in 1605, or 1606,

says .

“I turn no monies in the public bank,

No usure private.” (Act I, sc. 1, lines 38, 39)

But here the reference is pretty certainly to the Venetian institution, for
the play is laid in Venice. Other early uses of the word may be found in the
New English Dictionary.

rh Sixth page of the syxt Satyr. The Isham reprints, No. 2, edited by
Charles Edmonds, London, 1872. For an account of the earlier edition see
page xvu of the Introduction, and Hake’s “To the gentle Reader.”

7?sc^ffse ttsnrye, by way of Dialogue and oracions, etc., writ¬

ten by Dr. Thomas Wilson in 1569 (published 1572), fol. 163 verso.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 267

“for pompe sake onely to she we at the bancke (as they use in Italye
and other countreis) 1 Thus Moore’s reference in Utopia to a
goldsmith and “a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing
at all, or at best is employed in things that are of no use to the
public,” 2 may be interpreted to refer to continental conditions.
Hake’s statement, however, cannot possibly be so interpreted. Prob¬
ably by “in bancke” he means the custom of depositing money for
comparatively low interest with some individual, a scrivener, a broker,
or an ordinary “usurer,” who in turn lent it out at a higher rate.

Of the existence of such a system of banking, if such it may be
called, there is ample proof, and much earlier than 1646, the date
given by the author of The Mystery of the New Fashioned Gold¬
smiths or Bankers. Phillip Stubbes in his Amtomie of Abuses, of
15S3, describes the practice in detail: “for it is sayd (and I feare
me too true) that there are some to whome is committed a hundred
or two of poundes, of some more, of some lease, they putting in
good sureties to the owners for the repayment of the same againe,
with certaine allowance for the loane thereof ; then come there poore
men to them, desiring them to lend them such a som of money . . . ,
at last they lend them how much they desire, receiving of the poore
men what interest and assurance they lust themselves . . . ; where
note by the way the scrivener is the instrument wherby the divell
worketh the frame of this wicked woorke of usurie, hee beeing
rewarded with a good fleece for his labour.” 3 Surely this practice
can be called an embryonic kind of deposit banking as properly as
the practice of the goldsmiths, described in The Mystery of the New
Fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers more than ninety years later.
Stubbes does not define the “some,” to whom is committed the
deposits ; the implication is that these were scriveners, although he
may mean that scriveners were merely the go-betweens or negotiators.
In this connection it is interesting to note, however, that the Statute
21 Jac. I, governing bankruptcy, described, c. 19, the scrivener as
“receiving other Mens Money or Estates into his Trust or Cus¬
tody” ; 4 “bankers” and “brokers” were not included until much
later.

1 Ibid., fo. 48 verso, should be fo. 44 verso.

2 Ideal Commonwealths, in Henry Morley’s Thomas A’Kempis, etc., 1888,
p. 163.

8 Anatomie of Abuses, Collier’s Reprints, Yellow series, III, 129.

* Statutes of the Realm, IV, pt. 2, p. 1227.

268

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Cunningham refers to a fourteenth century practice, described
incidentally in Liber Alims, of brokers who acted as agents between
borrowers and lenders and received commissions for negotiating
loans. Such agency, Cunningham says, was “the nearest approach to
banking during the fourteenth century in the city.” 1 There is no
evidence that these brokers borrowed money or accepted it on
deposit and lent it at interest, and so the next step, in absence of
other proof, would seem to have been the one described by Stubbes.2

It is on the other hand well known that goldsmiths as well as
other merchants frequently lent their own money at interest, often
in large sums, throughout this period. Such loans, especially to the
Crown or to the City, seem to have been regarded as at least more
reputable than the transactions of the scriveners. The Merchant in
Wilson's Discourse obviously thinks it is to the credit of the mer¬
chants that they do lend to the state even for gain. “Do not you
knowe,” he exclaims, “that we are ever called upon in time of need
to lend to ye prince, for maintenance of the state ? Have not noble
men money of us, & all other gentlemen of service whensoever they
have neede? And where is money to be had, in tyme of neede, yf
the citie should fayle? Is not Londen the queenes chamber? Are
we not then chamberlens to her majestie, people al wayes ready to
spend not onely our goodes, but also our lyves in her service? We
lend not for usurie, but for interest and bv exchange.” 3 William
Touchstone, in Eastward Hoe (1604), a goldsmith, who is repre¬
sented as a thoroughly reputable and worthy citizen, is apparently in
the habit of lending money to the City for interest (Act IV, sc. 11,
lines 46-47) ; he may indeed be taken as a foil for Security, “an old
Usurer” in the same play.

The Elizabethan usurer who approximated the modern banker
in the more characteristic way, the scrivener or broker who made it
a part of his business to lend the money of other people at interest,
was not regarded with favor by his contemporaries. He was, never¬
theless, not regarded with quite the disfavor of still a third class,
the typical usurers, who ordinarily lent their own money, but at

1Vol. I, p. 365, ut supra.

2 In,< th?. A,yenbite °f At wyt of 1340 it is said that the ‘litle’ usurer bor-
t0 J5el <rost ”or t0 ’ene ^ patter cost.” (E. E. T. S. edition, p. 36.)
Whether this describes a French or an English practice, I am unable to say.

hoi. 57 verso and 58 recto, ut supra. See the interesting account of the
most famous of such chamberlens,” Sir Thomas Gresham, in Hall’s Society
in the Elizabethan Age, the chapter on the Merchant, pp 58-71

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 269

excessive rates, and to more or less needy individuals, and on the
security of mortgages and bonds. A still further and lower class
consisted of pawn-brokers, who differed from the typical usurers
primarily in that they lent smaller sums, dealt with a still needier
class of borrowers, and took chattels as security. Then as now they
seem to have been as much second-hand dealers as money-lenders,
and a considerable part of their profits came through the rental
and sale of forfeited pawns, especially old clothes.

The typical English usurer is described in Middleton’s Blacke
Bookc. The same may be said of the usurer described by Lodge in
Wits Miseries, and in An Alarum far Usurers; by Nashe, in Pierce
Pcnilcsse and in Christs T cares Over Jerusalem; by William Rowley
in A Search for Money; by Dekker in Ncwes from Hell; by Samuel
Rowlands in Diogines Lanthorne and in The Letting of Humors
Blood; and by the author of the Defense of Conny-catching.1 In
the drama, Lucre and Hoard of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1607) ; Peni-boy, the Uncle, in Jonson’s The Staple of News,
Quicksands in Brome’s The English Moor, Mamon in Marston’s Jack
Drums Entertainment, Hornet in Shirley's The Constant Maid, and
Algripe in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Night Walker, are perfect
representatives of the type.2 These creatures are all alike in that
they have no other business than money lending, apparently have
no place of business other than their residence, and also apparently
lend only their own money ; in that they deal characteristically with
young gentlemen of property and take mortgages as security ; and
in that they are described as loathsome in appearance, as cruel, crafty
and miserly. In describing their typical practices, however, it is
convenient to include the usuring merchants also, because they ex¬
ploited the same class of victims, took the same securities, and had
one practice in common, namely, the forcing of the so-called
commodity-loan.

The popular writers of the period who protested against usurers
were chiefly concerned with the exploitation of two classes of bor¬
rowers — of the poor by the pawn-brokers, and of young gentlemen by
the usurers and the usuring merchants. It is easy enough for us to
understand and sympathize with the protest against the first kind
of extortion, for pawn-shops, at least in the United States, to-day
1 Grosart’s Greene, Vol. XI.

2 See the writer’s “The Usurer in Elizabethan Drama,” PA1LA, XXXI
(1916), 190-210.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

270

are almost as scandalous as they were in England in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and their victims as deserving of pity. It is
difficult, however, at least for an American, to sympathize so deeply
with the protest or the victims of the second sort. The young
prodigals who were gulls, or were the reckless prey of the sharp
money-mongers would seem to have deserved the fate they met. The
extravagances of even a Timon seem rather silly, despite the mag¬
nificence of his prodigality. And for the most part, the “young heirs”
of the drama and other popular literature have not a Timon’s extenu¬
ation; they are utterly irresponsible, usually grossly immoral, and
often cruel in their treatment of others, whether their discarded
mistresses, or, indeed, their abused creditors. One is at first puzzled
at the sympathy accorded them, not for example by a Robert Greene
or a Thomas Nashe or a Thomas Lodge, who were apparently
kindred spirits, but by such a man as Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master
of Her Majesty’s Court of Request and Secretary of State, and
especially by all the divines.

The basis of this sympathy is not far to seek, however. Apart
from the universal love for the “witty rogue” and the rollicking “good
fellow,” there was a distinctly English basis for this sympathy. The
manors and lordships of the gentry were rapidly coming into the
hands of the vile tradesmen. This fact is deplored on all hands with
a seriousness not always easy to share. The humble Cripple in
Heywood’s Fair Maid of the Exchange, with characteristic “love of
a lord,” exclaims at the usurer Berry :

O I could spit

My heart into thy face; thou blood hound, that

Dost hurt the dear, dear life of noble gentry.1

In Middleton’s Phoenix, two young spendthrifts are described, “who
not only most riotously consume their houses in vicious gaming,
mortgaging their livings to the merchant whereby he with his heirs
enter upon their lands ; from whence this abuse comes, that in short
time the son of the merchant has more lordships than the son of
the nobleman, which else were never born to inheritance.” (V, i, 91
et seq.) The same complaint is made of old Gasparo in Chapman’s
May Day: now the cullion nath with noverint universi eaten up
some hundred gentlemen he must needs rise a gentleman as ’twere

‘Act II, sc. ii, p. 31, of the Shakespeare Society edition of 1846.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS

271

out of their ashes.” (Act II, sc. 1, page 281 of Shepherd’s edition of
Chapman’s Dramatic Works.)

Lodge laments the “abuse,” though he has the good sense to
grant “it is the gentlemen’s owne folly; . . . Purchased arms now
possess the place of ancient progenitors, and men made rich by
young youth’s misspendings doe feast in the halls of our nations
young spend-thrifts. . . . Truely, gentlemen this that I write is
true : I myselfe knowe the paymaster.” 1 Indeed, usurers were so
given over to exploiting the gentry and nobility that Thomas Bastard
exclaimed :

The poore can not have no accesse to them

Methinkes I heere the wretches how they call

Let’s have more usurers or none at all.3

But the real abuse, after all, was the elevation of the tradesmen ;
that complaint is made over and over again. One more example
must suffice. The aristocratic Mavortius in Histrio-Mastix (IV, i,
8-13) cries out :

. . . broad-cloathed tradesmen, and what-lack-you-sir
Is wrapt in riche habiliments of silke
Whilst urgent need makes Princes bend their Knee
As servile as the ignobilitie.

To crouch for coyne, whilst slaves tye fast our Lands
In Statute Staple, or these Merchants bands.

The most detailed description of the means by which usurers and
unscrupulous tradesmen “hurt the dear, dear life of noble gentry”
is to be found in Lodge’s An Alarum for Usurers, 1584. In its
thoroughness and its intent it is comparable to Robert Greene’s
expose of the “coney -catchers.” It has lists of names for the
various accomplices and devices in the typical usurious machinations,
such as “Gull groper,” “Wood-pecker,” the “Tombler,” and the
“Ferret,” which are obviously imitations of Greene’s coney-catching
nomenclature. In such terms as “Rabbet-suckers,” “the Rabbet,”
and “the Warren” the indebtedness is even more patent. The closest

1 An Alarum for Usurers, p. 48, in the Shakespeare Society’s edition of
A Defense of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays, 1853. There is interesting evi¬
dence that Lodge did know at least one such “paymaster.” George Stoddard,
whom Hall selects as a typical burgess and usuring merchant, was for a
number of years the apprentice and later the manager and agent for Lodge’s
father. See Hall’s Society in the Elizabethan Age, pp. 45-57.

1 Chrestoleros: Seven Bookes of Epigrames, Liber Secudus, Ep. 19, pp.
38-39; Publications of the Spenser Society, No. 47, 1888, pp. 44-45.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

parallel in the drama is Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, 1607, which
often seems to be almost a dramatization of Lodge’s Alarum. As to
the actual existence of the practices exposed in these and other works
there cannot be serious question, because of the well-nigh universal
mention and description of them in other popular literature, in the
declarations and provisions of the several statutes against usury, and
in many of the reported cases which came before the courts.

As has been said, the most typical means of fleecing the young
gentlemen was the commodity-loan, one of the “shifts” in usurious
sales of wares. Lord Mansfield in deciding a case of this sort 1 said
that “the most usual form of Usury is a pretended sale of goods.”
The statute of 37 Henry VIII, section ii, prohibited with heavy
penalties the sale of wares and repurchase of them at a lower price,
directly or by agent, within three months. The statute of Elizabeth
objected particularly to the statute of 5 and 6 Edward VI because “in
the said latter Acte there is no provision against corrupt Shyftes
and Sales of wares.” 2 The statute of 1623-1624 brought within its
prohibitions and penalties “any corrupt Bargaine (etc.) of any
Wares Marchandize or other Thing or Things whatsoever” by
which more than eight per cent was taken. Nevertheless, such
abuses were more easily legislated against than eliminated. After
all, if a man is willing to pay an unreasonable price for goods — and
that is what a commodity-loan virtually amounts to — the law cannot
prevent him or protect him ; the principle of caveat emptor obtains.

The typical practice of this sort was as follows. The borrower
comes to the usurer for money. The usurer declares he has not
the amount of money desired, but can give the borrower a certain
amount in cash and the equivalent of the remainder in wares, which,
presumably, the borrower can easily sell. The borrower gives bond,
secured, characteristically, by mortgage, for the entire sum. Of
course the opportunity for extortion lay in giving wares that were
of less value than the sum they were supposed to represent. Fre¬
quently, in spite of the provisions of the statutes, the usurer or the
merchant, through a broker, bought back the wares at a much lower
price.3

’Law v. Waller. Reported in Douglass, 708; see Plowden, 171

13 Eliz., c. 8, sec. 1.

"Wilson describes this proceeding with much detail, fol. 100 recto and
verso. The passage, as it appeared in the second edition (1584), is reprinted
on page 195 of the Belles-Lettres edition of Webster’s White Devil and
Duchess of Malfy , ed. Martin W. Sampson, 1904.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS

273

This practice was not peculiar to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, nor to England. Ballio says to the spend-thrift, Calidorus,
in the Pseudolus of Plautus : —

Eme die caeca hercle oliuom, id vendito oculata die :
lam hercle vel ducentae fieri possunt praesentes minae.1

The Philadelphia Public Ledger of November 30, 1913, under the
caption “Berlin Loan Sharks Aided by Merchants,” reported in a
special despatch: “A spend-thrift student gave notes for 30,000
marks’ worth of books, from the sale of which he realized 3,100
marks. The same plan is followed by certain dealers in rugs, art
objects, etc.”

The Elizabethan “loan-sharks” evidently made use of a much
greater diversity of commodities. The most common seem to have
been “lute-string” and brown paper. The first was possibly a kind
of lustrous silk fabric,2 although the plural “lute-strings,” which
frequently occurs, suggests strings for the guitar-like musical in¬
strument. In either case the commodity may have been readily
salable. In a Discourse of the Common Weal ( circa 1549), “paper,
bothe whyte and browne,” is listed among other examples of the
“generall dearthe of all thinges.” 3 However, when Quomodo, in
Michaelmas Term, says: “I know some gentlemen in town ha’ been
glad, and are glad at this time, to take up commodities in hawks
hoods and brown paper,” Easy exclaims : “O horrible ! are there
such fools in town ?” 4 The relative value or salability of some of
these wares is indicated by Nashe in Christs Teares. The first time
the young prodigal comes to the usurer, he gets money, the second
time, “silks and velvets,” the third time “baser commodities,” and the
fourth, “Lute strings and gray paper.” 8 Most of the wares must
have been hard to dispose of, and there are many jokes on young
gentlemen acting as their own chapmen and brokers.6

1 1, iii, 301, 302. In a note on the first of these lines, E. P. Morris says :
“This I understand to mean ‘buy on credit and sell for cash.’ ” Page 133 of
his The Pseudolus of Plautus, 2nd ed., 1895.

JCf. modern lustrine. The word appears, for example, on the first page
of Beatrix Potter’s version of The Tailor of Gloucester, published by Fred¬
erick Warne and Co., New York.

3 Ed. Elizabeth Lamond, 1893, p. 16, lines 31, 32.

4 II, i, 218-221.

‘ Works, ed. McKerrow, II, 94.

• Dekker thus describes the gulled young gentlemen : “like Pedlers, goe
they — up and downe to cry commodities.” ( The Seven Deadly Sins of Lon¬
don, Arber Reprint, p. 40.)

274 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Among the many commodities mentioned by the pamphleteers and
dramatists are “Buttons past fashion, silkes, and satins, Babies
(dolls) and childrens Fiddles”;1 “Fire-shovels” and “motley-cloake
bags” ; 2 Tobacco, “Bartholomew babies, Lute strings, Hob-nailes or
Saint Thomas Onions”;3 “yron, Tin, Lead, hops, sugar, spices,
Giles,” * and “blotting paper” and “pack-thread.” 5 Quicksilver, in
Eastward Hoe, says that Security will lend Sir Petronel “figges and
raysons”; and when they are objected to, asks : “Why then, sir, what
say you to fortie pound in roasted beef ?” 8

A variation of this method of extorting excessive returns for
the loan of money is described by several writers. Lodge, in his
Wits Miserie, says, if you come to borrow money of a usurer “he
will take no usury, no marry will hee not; but if you require ten
pound, you shall pay him forty shillings for an old cap and the rest
is yours in ready money.” 7 This seems to be an actual sale of a
cap for two pounds and a loan of eight pounds, and not strictly a
loan of ten pounds, two of them in commodity. Miles Mosse says
he once knew a usurer whose “old hosen, and doubletts, and coates,
when they were past his owne wearing, proved unto him the richest
part of his wardrobe. For a man could not borrow a hundred
pounds, but he must buy of him an old frise coate . . . ; and the
price of it was not commonly lesse than twentie markes.” 8

Other of the evasions of the laws against usury are interesting
as throwing light on the possibilities of evading the statutes. The
most of them, however, if one can judge from contemporary refer¬
ences and the number of cases that came to court, were not gen¬
erally practiced. Lodge mentions two in particular which may have
been used more extensively. He describes a contract wherein the
lender agrees to pay at a certain time a much larger sum than he
borrowed, “if so be that the said M.S. (the lender) or S. his wife be
in life . . . ; Now in this condition the casual mort bringeth it

1 Robert Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the Devil , Act I, sc. ii; Old
English Plays, New Series, ed. A. H. Bullen, 1890, III, 198.

Dekker’s Seven Deadly Sins, ut supra, p. 39.

* Dekker’s Lanthorne and Candle-Light, N on-Dramatic Works Huth Li¬
brary, III, 23 3.

‘Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, Huth Library, XI, 276.
Wilson’s Discourse, fol. 100 verso.

II, iii, 44‘5°- See note on this passage in the Belles-Lettres edition, p ici
P. 28, ut supra.

* Arraignment and Conzhction of Usurie, 1595, p. 63.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 275

out of the compasse of the statute.”1 Other worke by lives; as if
such a one live thus long, you shall give mee, during his or her life
10 pounds a yeare for 30 pounds.” 2 It is not necessary, probably
not possible, to list, much less describe, all the forms of “cloaked
usury” by which young spendthrifts and others were, or could have
been, undone. “For there are thirteen hundred, yea thirteen thousand
devises which men of evill conscience have invented to avoyde the
shew and danger of usurie,” said Mosse.3

Of these, the commodity-loan was beyond question the one
most generally used. It protected the usurer from the penalties of
the law, and afforded merchants an excellent outlet for unsalable or
shopworn wares. The sums extorted by the commodity loans were
large ; the Berlin loan-sharks seem to have made scarcely larger
profits. Lodge, who seems more reliable and conservative than the
other popular pamphleteers, declares: “Truely I myselfe knew him
that received the like, and may boldly avouch this — that of that
thirtie pounds commoditie there could by no broker be more made
than foure nobles : the commoditie was lute-stringes. . . . Naie, com¬
mon losses, and the reasonablest is, for 36 pounds for three months,
accounted a good penie worth, if there be made in redie mony 20
pounds ; nay, passing good, if they make 25 poundes ; and I have
knowen of fortie, but fifteen pound and tenne shillings.” 4 Dekker,
who it must be confessed gives a suspiciously elaborate scheme of
fleecing of this sort, says that at the end “must our yong son and
heire pay £500 (for which he never had but £66).” However, four
confederates have divided what money was received. The merchant
who lent wares in this instance would not repurchase them “under
30 £ losse in the Hundred.” 5

Of course the usurer did not always buy back his own wares,
though often he did through his disguised agent. In either case he
ordinarily made by such a transaction from twenty to fifty per cent.

1 Alarum, ut supra, p. 65.

2 Ibid.

2 Arraignment and Conviction, etc., ut supra, p. 59. See the forms of con¬
tract found in Stoddard’s ledger and reprinted by Hall in his Society in the
Elizabethan Age, pp. 52-54. See, also, the list of evasions in Richard John¬
son’s Look on Me, London, pp. 21, 22, Collier’s Illustrations of Early English
Popular Literature, Vol. II, No. 7. The treatises by the divines give many
more, but one can never be sure that the evasions given by them were often
(or ever) employed by Englishmen.

4 Alarum, ut supra, pp. 65, 66.

s Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Huth Library, III, 235.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

276

Plowden describes the case of Barker v. Vansommer, and others, in
which Alcon, a jew, farced Barker, “a student of Wadham College,”
to take silks in place of money, for which Barker received from
Alcon’s confederates “about half the price.” 1 Quomodo in Michael¬
mas Term makes Easy give bond for two hundred pounds, for which
bond Easy receives cloth which Quomodo through an accomplice buys
back “for three score pound.” Well could he exclaim : “Admire me
all you students at the inns of cozenage.” 2

The usurer was frequently more concerned with gaining the
security than the excessive interest. It was only when the bond
was forfeited that the lands of the “noble gentry” could come into
the possession of the usurer or the merchant. No doubt the fore¬
closed mortgages were the chief source of wealth to the usurer, as
the forfeited pawns were to the broker. Hence it was that we fre¬
quently find the usurers in the plays or elsewhere trying their best
to prevent payment, or regarding it as a calamity when the principal
and even exorbitant usury were paid on the stipulated day.

Would it were raz’d out of the kalender quite:
It is a day prodigious !

exclaimed the Usurer in Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the
Devil, when this happened to him, after he had urged Slightall to
defer payment a fortnight or a month.3 In A Looking Glass for
London and England, by Lodge and Greene, and again in Dekker’s
If it be not Good the Devil is in It, the usurers resort to extreme
tricks to prevent payment, such as talking beyond the hour, and
setting the clock forward. In the latter play Barterville scatters
some money among the coins offered in payment, so that the debtor
cannot certainly tender his own money to cancel the bond. In most
cases, however, the usurer did not need to resort to such means to
have the mortgage forfeited. The usury — and the extravagance of
the borrower were ordinarily sufficient to guarantee possession of
the lands to the usurer, once the “simple gentleman” was in his
toils. Wilson declares that “lands worthe tenne thousand P. have ben
forfeited for not paying a thousand in moneye, . . . whereas the
simple gentleman never borrowed in his life ye nete summe of V

1 Plowden, 169, cites I Bro. C. C. 149. See also Law '
Ihe treatises on Usury by Ord, Comyn, and Plowden
commodity loans.
s II, iii, 486-487.

3 Act V, sc. ii; ed. Bullen, p. 284.

. Waller, Doug. 712.
cite many cases of

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS

277

hundred pound.” 1 Dekker describes the course of a young man who
had not yet come into his property: ‘‘he must presently confesse a
judgment, for so much money, or for such a Manor or Lordship
(three times worth the bond forfeited) to be paid or to be entered
upon by him, by such a day, or within so many moneths after he
comes to his land. And thus are young heires coozened out of
their Acres before they well know where they lye.” 2

The profits, in the form of mortgage or other forfeited securities
and in the outrageous usury possible under commodity-loans and
other “shifts,” that came to the unscrupulous usurer must have given
him great wealth very quickly. There is much evidence that such
was the case. The typical description of the beggarly clothes was
varied by such details as the gold chain about the neck,3 the furred
gown — preferably fox-furred — “habiliments of silk,” and other sym¬
bols of prosperity. When these were combined with the fair lands
of the gentry, in the person of a “what-lack-you-sir,” the figure
was no doubt more shocking to the average Englishman than the
dirty, miserly creature whom Lodge and others described as the
incarnation of avarice. There are many accounts of these new rich
and their progress. An abstract of one in Nashe’s Christs Tcares
over Jerusalem * must suffice. “This is the course now-a-dayes every
one taketh to be ritch” : A young trader saves his money while
working for his master, gains the good opinion of other merchants
and of gentlemen, and then borrows money of every one he can to
start in business for himself. “He falls acquainted with Gentlemen,
frequents Ordinaries and Dicing-houses daily, where, when some
of them (in play) have lost all theyr money, he is very diligent at
hand, on their chaynes, or Bracelets, or jewels, to lend them halfe
the value.” He knows “they will come againe the seconde time,”
when he gives them less valuable commodities. “When thus this
young Usurer hath thrust all hys pedlary into the hands of novice
heyres, that he hath made, of his three thousand, nine thousand in
Bonds and recognisances (beside the strong fayth of the forfey-

1 Compound interest accounts for the difference between the five hundred
and the thousand pounds. Fo. 135 recto and verso, A Discourse, etc., ut supra.
See a similar case in fo. 33 verso, quoted page 46 of New Variorum edition
of Merchant of Venice. See also the account of George Stoddard’s dealings
with Francis Alcough, “a country gentleman,” in Hall’s Society in the Eliza¬
bethan Age, pp. 55, 56.

1 Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Huth Library, III, 224.

3 See Much Ado About Nothing, II, ii, 183.

* McKerrow, ut supra, II, 93-95.

278 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

tures), he breakes” and settles with his creditors “for eighty in the
hundred. He then settes uppe fresher than ever he did. Those
Bonds and Statutes he hath, he puts in sute amaine. For a hundred
pound commodity (which is not forty pound money, he recovers by
relapse some hundred pound a yeere. In three Tearmes of a bank-
rout he waxeth a great landed man, and may compare with the best
of his company. O intolerable Usury ! not the Jewes (whose peculiar
sinne it is) have ever committed the like. What I write is most true,
and hath beene practiced by more than one or two. I have a whole
Booke of young Gentlemens cases lying by mee, which if I should
sette foorth, some grave Auncients (within the hearing of Bow-
bell) would be out of charity with mee.”

The early careers of the rascal described by Nashe and of the
Burgess, George Stoddard, described by Hall in his Society in the
Elizabethan Age, run curiously parallel. The chief difference is
that Stoddard seems not to have taken advantage of the bankruptcy
laws. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that Nashe describes a
real abuse. Dekker condemns “Politicke Bankruptisme” bitterly, as
the first of the “Seven Deadly Sins of London.” Much of the
gentleman’s hatred for the merchant, especially the usuring mer¬
chant, must have been due to the fact that only the merchants, those
who “used the trade of merchandise” or who “sought their living by
buying and selling” 1 could escape imprisonment for debt by volun¬
tary bankruptcy under the Statute 13 Eliz. c. 7.

Apparently such “grave Auncients” as Nashe described were to
be found among many of the regular “companies.” The rascally
usurer, Quomodo, in Michaelmas Term was a “woolen draper.”
In Dekker’s Lanthorne and Candle-Light the Tumbler tries to secure
commodity-loans from goldsmiths, drapers, mercers, and haber¬
dashers. In Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier, a “merchant”
who would seem to have run a department store, for he sold among
other things iron, hops, spices, and brown paper, is spoken of among
others who made commodity-loans. In all probability the making of
such loans and the lending of money for gain were not restricted to
any special classes of merchants or men. In the absence of an
organized system of banking, all men who had surplus funds and
were not over-nice “in point of Religion or Conscience” no doubt

‘ Blackstone’s Com., 19th London edition, II, 474.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS

279

engaged in the traffic of money. Gromelgayner, the Merchant in
Wilson’s Discourse, probably describes the typical merchant when he
says : “I have bene a doer in this worlde these 30 winters, and as
fresh an occupier as any other, and yet never found I better or more
assurde gaine, than by puttinge out my mony for gaine. . . . And in
a dead time when there is no occupying, either by restraint or through
warres, what would you have merchants to do, otherwise than to
tume the peny, and to live by their money ?” 1

We have seen in the description given by Stubbes that the scriv¬
ener was early associated with the business of borrowing and lend¬
ing, at least as an agent for the usurer and as one to whom a
prospective borrower would be likely to go. In Edward Sharpham’s
The Fleire, of 1606, Ruffell is asked what he saw in hell : “O, I saw
a scrivener damb’d for procuring a Gentleman money gratis.” 2
Sir Thomas Overbury says, of the character of A Devilish Usurer,
“He puts his money to the unnatural act of generation; and his
scriv’ner is the supervisor bawd to ’t.” 3 The scrivener acting for
the usurer, in Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, has given
stimulus to Slightall’s dissipations. The fact that the scrivener’s
profession was regarded as reputable and that he had a regular place
of business (a shop with ‘‘Labells hanging at (the) door,” 4 made
him a very valuable agent for the aristocratic borrower, who would
not care to enter the ordinary pawn-shop, and for the usurer, who
apparently had no regular office or shop, and who often no doubt
did not care to have his practice known. Evidently the scriveners
of the period were able to make a considerable sum by fees in such
transactions. Hog, the usurer in Robert Tailor’s The Hogge hath
lost his Pearle, says he has made his scrivener rich.5 In fact the
scrivener’s fees became so excessive that Parliament in 1603 passed
a law restricting their “Brockerage” to five shillings per hundred
•pounds, and their fee to one shilling for the making of a bond.6

In the allegorical Seven Deadly Sins of London, Dekker says of

1 Fo. 57 verso, ut supra.

‘Act V, 11. 149, 150, reprinted by Hunald Nibbe in Materialien zur Kunde,
Vol. 36, 1913, p. 56.

8 The Miscellaneous Works of, etc., ed. by Ed. F. Rimbault, 1890, p. 133.

* Act II, sc. ii, of Davenport’s A New Trick to Catch the Devil, Bullen’s
Old English Plays, New Series, III, 218.

5 Act V ; Dodsley, XI, 490.

'21 Jac. I, c. 17, sec. i, Stat. of Realm, Part 2, p. 1223.

280 schelling anniversary papers

Usury, “hath she sonnes m law, and they are all Scriveners : these
Scriveners have base sonnes, and they are all common Brokers” ; 1
and in Worke for Armourers, he describes the same relationship
between usurers and brokers that Overbury does between usurers
and scriveners : “Brokers are now their Baudes and keepe the dores
till the lechery of ten in the hundred be sated.” 2 A less figurative
description of the function of the broker is this: “for when a
young youthful Gentleman, . . . wanteth money, makes hee not his
moane first to the Broker . . . ? and he must be feede to speake
to the Usurer, and have so much in the pound for his labour.” 3 In
fact the exact business of men called brokers is hard to describe;
the term was apparently applied to men who plied various trades.

The Act of 1603-04 “against Brokers” recites that “of longe and
ancient tyme by divers hundred yeares there have ben used within
the citie of London and Liberties thereof, certaine Freemen of the
citie to be selected out of the Companies and Mysteries whereof they
are free and Members to be Broker or Brokers ... to use and
demeane themselves uprightlie and faithfullie betweene Merchant
Englishe and Merchant Strangers and Tradesmen in the contrivings
. . . Bargaines and Contracts to be made betweene them . . . ,
and Moneys to be taken up by Exchange . . . , and these kind of
persons . . . have had and borne the Name of Brokers, . . . who
never of any ancient time used to buy and sell Garments and
Apparell and all things that came to hand for Money, laid out and
lent upon Usurie, and to keepe open Shoppes ... as now of late
yeeres hathe and is used by a number of citizens assuminge unto
themselves the name Brokers and Brokerage, as though the same
were an honeste and a lawfull Trade Misterie or Occupation.”

It is, of course, the second sort of brokers who are being con¬
sidered in these pages. However, the name was applied to men not
engaged In either of the above occupations. The usurer sometimes
had an agent whose business it was to look about for profitable loans,
a kind of solicitor, who was also called a broker; the Scrivener in
A New Trick to Cheut the Deznll did precisely this. Such a one,
called variously a “Broker,” “a broking knave” and a “solicitour,”

1 Arber’s reprint, p. 22.

2 Huth Library edition, IV, 132.

2 Defence of Coney-catching, Grosart’s Greene, XI, 53.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 281

and his methods are described with much detail in Lodge’s Alarum ,
and elsewhere. “They finde out . . . some old soaking undermining
solicitour, whom they both furnish with money and expense to sette
him foarth, and gette him more creditte ; this good fellowe must’
haunt Ordinarys, canvasse up and downe Pawles, and as the catte
watcheth the praye of the mouse, as dilygentlye intendes hee to the
compassinge of some young novice.” 1 Quicksilver becomes such a
broker for Security in Eastward Hoe, after his services have been
indignantly refused by Touchstone. Shortyard, servant of Quomodo
in Michaelmas Term, makes use of all the devices described in the
Alarum by which these “bawds between gold and want” 2 led the
“young novice” into extravagance and dissipation. Indeed actual
panders were sometimes called brokers.3 It is scarcely necessary to
point out that broker was the name frequently given to the man who
bought the commodities unloaded on the borrowing gull. Often this
broker was the usurer’s man or agent; it is Falselight, Quomodo’s
servant, disguised as “Master Idem,” who buys Easy’s “two hundred
pounds worth a’ cloth,” “for three score pound.” 4

Possibly more often, however, the borrower disposed of his
commodities at some pawn-shop, which was also a second-hand store.
The act against what we should call pawn-brokers, quoted above,
goes on to say that such “counterfeit brokers, and Pawnetakers upon
Usurie, . . . are growen of late to many hundreds within the Citie
of London, and other places next adjoyninge to the Citie and Liber¬
ties of the same, . . . being Friperers,5 and no Brokers, . . . and
within the memorie of many yet livinge such kinde of persons
Tradesmen were verie fewe and of small number.” The number
of these brokers and their comparatively late appearance in London
is further confirmed by Edward Hake in Newes out of Paules
Churcheyard, of 1567 and 1579. He declares that “of late” an “act”
was passed permitting thirty such brokers “within the Towne,” but

1 The Alarum, pp. 44, 45. How such a broker proceeded, is detailed in the
three following pages of the Alarum.

1 Timon of Athens, II, ii.

‘See Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable, II, i, 117.

4 Michaelmas Term, II, iii, 471 and 485-486.

‘See the character, Fripper, in Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive, and the de¬
scription of his “profession,” called “Frippery,” and “Petty Brokery,” Act III,
sc. 1, The Wlorks of George Chapman: Plays, ed. Richard H. Shepherd,
London, 1874, p. 128; also the character Frippery, in Middleton’s Your Five
Gallants.

28 2

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

that the magistrates have allowed “whole hundreds” to engage in the
business.1 Orlando in The Honest Whore, Part II, written in 1604,
or 1608, says he knows “five hundred” of them.2

We even know the districts and streets in which they most
abounded. There is constant reference to them in Houndsditch and
Longlane, confirmed by Stow. On Houndsditch (street) he says are
“such houses builded, as doe rather want roome than rent, which
houses be for the most part possessed by Brokers, sellers of olde
apparrell, and such like.” 3 Of Longlane he says : “This lane is now
lately builded on both the sides with tenements for brokers, tiplers,
and such like.” 4 Taylor, “the Water Poet,” says it is the name of
the former :

Which makes me aske myselfe a question plaine,

Was Houndsditch Houndsditch call’d can any tell,
Before the Brokers in that street did dwell?

No sure it was not, it hath got that name
From them, and since that time they thither came ;
And well it now may called be Houndsditch,

For there are Hounds will give a vengeance twiech.6

Dekker puns on the name of the second street, when he says: “of
Brokers theres a longer lane of them in hell, than there is in Lon¬
don.” 6 John Day borrows the pun from Dekker in speaking of “a
long-lane of louzy Tenements” built by brokers.7 A few other streets
or districts are mentioned. Rowlands speaks of “Holbourne con-
duite” along with “Houndsditch” and “Longlane.” 8 Dekker, after
mentioning the Brokers of the two usual streets, says : “all the rest
of their colleagued Suburbans.” 9 The author of the Defense of
Conny-Catching exposes the practice of one Paine whose shop was

1 The seaventh Satyr , pp. 8, 9.

3 III, ii, 64.

r?fy London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 1908, I, 128, 129
Ibid., II, 28.

'A Brood of Cormorants— An Extortioner and a Broaker Works re¬
printed by the Spenser Soaety, Vol. Ill; page 7 of the original. For other
IefKerenpeS -° the br0kers in Houndsditch, see Dekker’s Seven
' ArbCr Repnnt- P- SO! and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor

8 N ernes from Hell, Huth ed., II, 137

« 'll. Ktn9dome, Works, ed. Pearson, IV, 267.

» NT,.Letltn9 °tr Hu™fre Blood Satyr 2, p. 52, Hunterian Club.

Semes from Hell, Huth ed., II, 135.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 283

“not farre from Fleetbridge.” 1 Throat, a character in Lodowick
Barry’s Ram Alley, sends four books as pawns “to the brokers in
Fetter Lane.” And Middleton refers to “Birchin-lane” as a habitat
of second-hand clothes dealers.2

Their shops, with suits hung out in front, “with a gambrel thrust
from shoulder to shoulder, like a sheep that were new dead,” 3 must
have resembled those of to-day closely, and must have caused much
amusement when represented on the stage. Middleton’s Your Five
Gallants opens in “A Room in Frippery’s House,” with Frippery
himself “discovered summing up his pawns” of clothes, rapiers, a
“gilt casting-bottle,” a silver “lie-pot,” etc.4

Nor could the methods and exactions of the Elizabethan pawn¬
brokers have differed much from ours. In the above play, Frippery
says : “our pawn is ever thrice the value of our money, unless in
plate and jewels ; how should the months be restored and the use else?
We must cast it for the twelve-month, so many pounds, so many
months, so many eighteen pences; then the want of the return of
these pounds ; all these must be laid together ; which well considered,
the valuation of the pawn had need to sound treble.” 5 A pawn shop
and broker are also put on the boards in William Rowley’s Match at
Midnight. A smith enters to borrow a “noble,” on a “spare vice” ;
he finally receives “five shillings upon ’t, which, at the fortnight’s end,
goodman File, you must make five shillings six pence. . . . And then
I had forgot three pence for my bill.” 6

Lodge, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, does not seem to
know so much about these “cormorants” as Greene and Dekker, for
example. One of the most thorough-going and earnest of the many
accounts of the pawn-broker, his extortions and his victims, is
Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, of 1592. Herein one is
described : “a square set fellow well fed, and as briskly apparelled,
in a black taffeta dublet and a spruice leather jerkin, with christall
buttons ; . . . his face something Ruby blush, cherry cheeked, like a

1 Grosart’s Greene, XI, 78.

2 The Blacke Booke, Bullen’s Middleton, VIII, 29; cf. Stow, I, 198, 199, ut
supra, on Burcheouer “now corruptly called Bircheinlane,” where dwelt “for
the most part — Fripperers or Upholders, that solde apparell and householde
stuffe.”

1 Monsieur U Olive, p. 129, ut supra.

* Act I, sc. i.

e I, i, 92-99.

®Act I, Dodsley, XIII, 9. I cannot follow the other computations — may be
the usurer did not intend that “goodman File,” or any one else, should.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

284

shreed of scarlet, or a little darker, like the lees of old claret wine;
. . . upon his fingers as many gold rings, as would furnish a gold¬
smiths shop ... let mee come to him with a pawn worth ten pound,
he will not lend upon it above three pound, and he will have a bill
of saile and twelve pence in the pound for every month, so that it
comes to sixteen pence, sith the bill must monthly be renued, and if
you breake but your day set doune in the bill of saile, your pawne
is lost . . . ; suppose yt best, you keep your day, yet paying sixteen
pence a month for twenty shillings ; you pay as good for the lone as
fower score in the hundred : Such brokers extort upon the poare that
are in forced through extreme want to pawn their cloathes and house¬
hold stufife, their pewter and brasse ; . . . I have knowne of late when
a poore woman laid a silver thimble ... to pawn for six pence, the
broker made her pay half penny a week for it, which came to two
shillings a yere, for six pence.” 1 Henry Chettle in Kind-Harts
Dreame gives the same rates.2

By 1678 the rates and charges seem even to have increased. In
an anonymous pamphlet entitled Four for a Penny: or Poor Robin’s
Character of an U riconscionable Pawn-Broker, etc., the victims are
described as coming into the shop: “like other prisoners, they first
pay garnish, the two pences for entrance-money: after this six pence
a month for every twenty shillings lent, which yet indeed is but nine¬
teen shillings and six-pence ; that is, according to their reckoning of
thirteen months to the year; which makes thirty-three pounds, six
shillings, and eighteen pence in the hundred; . . . besides twelve
pence for a bill of sale, if the matter be considerable.” 3

In addition to the profits made through charges and the forfeiture
of pawns, these brokers received some income from the renting of
the pawns before they were redeemed. Frippery, in Middleton’s
Your Five Gallants, rents to a bawd suits for his women at twelve
pence a day.4 Fitzdotterel, in Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, rents
clothes of the broker, Engine, for gala occasions. Wittipol' says :
“Engine gets three or four pounds a week by him.” 5 We have seen,
if Frippery’s word is to be trusted, that most of the pawns were
worth three times the value of the money lent on them. In the sale

1 Grosart’s Greene, XI, 242-246.

3 Frag<rs. s°> Si, Percy Society Publications.

4 narletan Miscellany, 1810, VIII, 180.

6 1, ii, Gifford’s Jonson, V, 21.

MONEY LENDING AND MONEY-LENDERS 285

of those forfeited, therefore, there must also have been large
profit. A still greater profit was probably realized from the buying
and selling of stolen goods. There are numerous references to the
pawn-brokers as receivers of such ware.1 In fact it was to remedy
only this abuse that the “Act against Brokers” (1603-4) was passed.

To quote the words of the author of The Defence of Conny-
Catching, which was a protest against Greene’s having spent so much
time on “coney-catchers” and having allowed more dangerous
“thieves,” such as usurers and brokers, to go unmentioned : “It were
an endless peace of work, to discover the abominable life of brokers,
whose shops are the very temples of the devil.” Only one more detail
of this life can be given, and that is the manner in which they were
frequently accused of investing their ill-gotten gains. The broker
that Greene described so circumstantially had “interest in the leases
of forty baudy houses.” 2

This disagreeable detail must close the account of

The sonnes of Mammon, money-monger slaves,

With bribing Scriveners, and with broking knaves.3

1 See the Defence of Conny- catching , Grosart’s Greene, XI, 78; Greene’s
Quip, etc., ibid., XI, 243, stolen verbatim by Rowlands in his Martin Mark- All,
p. 14, Hunterian Club; and Dekker’s Jests to Make You Merie, Huth Library,
II, 335-

2 A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, Grosart’s Greene, XI, 343.

3 Samuel Rowland’s The Divell, and the Usurer, of A Paire of Spy Knaves,
Hunterian Club, p. 14.

■■

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

Charles Wharton Stork

THE salient quality of Swedish poetry is its nationalism. Not
only is the patriotic verse of Sweden unusually vital, but there
is a rich autochthonous flavor in nearly all the narrative and
descriptive pieces. Indeed this virtue, combined as it is with finished
artistry of form, constitutes the chief attraction of Swedish poetry
for the foreigner. We cannot read long without detecting a Hesiodic
charm, a closeness to the soil and the traditions of the soil. We may
be reminded in turn of Theocritus, of Burns, of Beranger, or of
Morike, but always with a difference. It is not of the earth in
general but of his native earth in particular that the Swedish poet
sings, thus exhibiting an originality of the soundest sort. We feel
that from this poetry we are getting a pleasure which could not
possibly be found elsewhere.

In the splendid array of poets in modern Swedish literature,
which dates from about 1750, nine men stand out strongly as of the
first rank: namely, Bellman, Tegner, Runeberg, Rydberg, Snoilsky,
Froding, Levertin, Heidenstam and Karlfeldt, of whom the last two
are still living. Among these only two could conceivably have de¬
veloped elsewhere than in Sweden and Finland. Oskar Levertin,
with his Jewish extraction, with his almost morbid love of beauty
as an end in itself, is a natural exception. He is a mystic, a typical
poet of the ivory tower. More powerful, more human, more inter¬
esting in every way is Viktor Rydberg.

Rydberg is the seer of Swedish poetry. He is not in any sense
un-Swedish, but his philosophic mind and lofty spirit carry him
beyond his native land into the realm of human brotherhood and of
pure ideas. He is neo-classic, like Goethe and Arnold ; cosmic, uto¬
pian and visionary, like iEschylus and Shelley. He fuses Biblical
with classic tradition as does Milton, and he shows at times the
influence of Poe in his love of lyric melody. He is thus both an
eclectic and a citizen in the world of ideal poetry. With a few

287

288 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

notable exceptions, his Swedish extraction appears only in his
imagery, which abounds in figures of the sea and of storm. His
spirit is Teutonic but not peculiarly Scandinavian.

Rydberg’s life can be but indistinctly divined from his poetry.
His clear philosophic tone might lead us to infer that, like Arnold,
he inherited fine traditions of culture, and, like Goethe, enjoyed the
privileges of a fine education without any preliminary struggle. The
exact opposite was the case. We shall, however, be right when we
infer, from his long imaginative flights, that he was a man of lonely,
sensitive temperament. Like Poe, he thought of life as a mysterious
riddle and pictured certain demonic forces at work against the divine
in man’s nature ; but morbidness, though occasional with him, did not
prevail in his life or his philosophy of life. It is evident, then, that
the idealism of Rydberg is of an unusual and somewhat complex
nature. Though his life will not explain his art, we could not
account for certain important phases of Rydberg’s poetry without
knowing something of the man.

Viktor Rydberg (born in 1828) was the son of a prison warden.
The influence of his mother and of nature offset the pressure of
extreme poverty. His early life was a brave and successful struggle
to obtain an education. In 1851 he entered the University of Lund,
but was obliged to break off his studies for a time and earn his liveli¬
hood by tutoring. At this point a patron came to his rescue and
saved him from going to America as an engineer by giving him a
position in a newspaper office. His work left him time for literary
activity, and he soon manifested his gift by producing three historical
novels which retain their popularity to the present day.

The third of these, The Last Athenian, which appeared in 1859,

is frequently ranked as the greatest novel in Swedish. It is typical
in many ways of Rydberg’s breadth and fairness of view. Neo-
Platonism is contrasted with a phase of early Christianity, somewhat
to the advantage of the former. Nevertheless, the chief Christian in
the story is portrayed with sympathy. In style The Last Athenian
is very noble and beautiful, so much so as to be termed by some
critics a prose poem. This is very natural, as the romance is, despite
its lively narrative interest, rather one of ideas than of incidents.

Rydberg now undertook with more freedom and confidence the
study of religion in history. The writings which resulted from this
embody, as we might expect, a seeking for the spirit of Christianity

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG 289

and a vigorous attack on ecclesiastical narrowness. During these
investigations Rydberg made a journey to Italy which stimulated his
imagination in many ways. Another congenial field was opened by
the analysis and translation of Goethe’s Faust, the most important
source, next to the Bible, of Rydberg’s philosophic and poetic devel¬
opment. From 1870 on it became apparent that the highest expres¬
sion of his genius would be in verse.

In 1876 Rydberg entered upon an academic career, as lecturer in
philosophy and history, and in 1884 he was made professor.
Although most of his later writings were in the fields of poetry or
scholarship, he published in 1891 another important novel, The
Armorer, this time with a medieval background. The story portrays
the advance of spiritual freedom won by the Reformation. Rydberg
died in 1895.

It has been indicated that the life of Viktor Rydberg was filled
with varied activities, but through them all his master passion may
be clearly traced. He was as truly a seeker after truth as any man
that ever lived. However, as we rarely find so abstract a principle
in a mind of humble antecedents, we are not surprised that the
idealism of Rydberg is of a very special order. Herein the special
power of the poet lies. The struggle of his early life gave him a
deeper and more vital knowledge of common humanity than was
vouchsafed to such of his spiritual brethren as Plato, Goethe, Shel¬
ley, Emerson, and Arnold. His philosophy is always directed to the
problems of the average thoughtful man. With some resemblance to
Carlyle, he escaped from the turbidness and gloom of the latter into
a more serene and classic atmosphere. His virile optimism has been
compared to that of Browning, but his interest in mankind is ex¬
pressed in a much clearer and more general way. The central quality
of Rydberg’s writing would seem to be that he is one of the most
humanistic of philosophers and one of the most philosophical lovers
of his kind.

Besides humanism, the early life of Rydberg must have helped in
giving him emotional force and earnestness. He is an apostle of
goodness and beauty who has fought his way through hard oppo¬
sition. There is deep strength in his voice, as if he had learned to
sing in the storm. His poems are products, not of the garden but of
the cliff. That his style should be withal so balanced, lucid and
finished in detail is perhaps a secret of the author’s happy nature.

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

290

We should remember, however, that nearly all of Rydberg’s poems
were written after he was forty, which is doubtless one reason for
their mellowness of tone and soundness of style.

But we have been going too much on mere assertion. It is time
to let Rydberg speak for himself, as well at least as he can through
the medium of verse translation. The renderings which follow are
identical with the originals as to meter and are at the same time fairly
literal. That they should reproduce the exquisite verbal music of
the Swedish is of course not to be hoped. As a central statement
of the poet’s philosophy and a splendid example of his art we may
quote the beginning and end of the famous “Cantata.”

CANTATA

for the Graduation Festival at Upsala,
the sixth of September, 1877.

CHORUS

From the dark of the ages gliding
Toward a goal unknown to thee
Through the desert thou hast been striding
Long, long, oh Humanity!

Thy day is only a glimmer
Of feeble and pallid light, —

Before, the mist is yet dimmer ;

Behind is the void of night.

The armies with which thou farest
Droop earthwards day by day,

And, trembling, thou nigh despairest:
“Almighty, where leads the way?”

What sight upon Earth reveals not
That all things fade as the grass;

Look upward, and Heaven conceals not
That even her glories pass, —

That suns in those lofty regions
Run slower or cease to be.

And quenched are the starry legions
In the aether’s unmeasured sea.

Thou hearest how voices lonely
Cry: “All is transient here,

And Time and Space are only
A prison gloomy and drear.”

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

291

RECITATIVE

And yet, though thou be sunken deep in doubt
And tarriest brooding by the road, anon
Thou tak’st again thy banner with a shout
And o’er the desert bear’st it boldly on.

What matter if a thousand suns are thrown
To Chaos from their battlements sublime?

What though a starry harvest lieth mown
Like golden grain beneath the scythe of Time?

Thy noble thoughts, thy acts of love, thy dreams
Of beauty — these Time never can devour;

Eternity like some great storehouse teems

With sheaves safe-garnered from destruction’s power.

Go forth, Mankind! be glad, thy cares at rest;

Thou bear’st Eternity within thy breast.

The allegory of human life as the pilgrimage of the Children
of Israel concludes with the following picture of the four learned
faculties :

Theology

(Exod. 17; I Cor. 10:4)

Dost thou doubt that in the distance waits for thee the Promised Land?
Dost thou faint with thirst and hunger, hopeless 'mid the burning sand?
See! the Rod of Moses smiteth, from the rock the waters well.

On, Mankind across the desert, on, thou greater Israel !

Still hast thou the rod to smite with and thy bitter thirst allay ;

And the Rock — oh glorious marvel ! — follows ever on thy way.

Bend thy knee above the fountain, let its pure transparent wave
Cool thee, and go on rejoicing in the wondrous strength it gave!

Jurisprudence
(Exod. 19)

As before the torrid simoon clouds of dust are whirled along,

So the Tribes of Israel drifted forth from Horeb in a throng.

Can they ever reach the Jordan, marching thus in disarray?

See! where Sinai lifts its lightninged head to heaven beside the way.

Hill and vale resound with thunder at the voice of Justice then,

And each man’s astounded bosom echoes back a deep “Amen !”

So the straggling ranks take order by the Law’s divine commands,
Grown into a glorious people bound in one by sacred bands.

Medicine

With the Law's high tabernacle now they march unitedly,

Making way through hostile weapons toward the Land of Liberty.

But what strikes the tr^~r'0 "dth pallor? Wherefore did the banner sink?
Dread, insidious fever-serpents through the stricken army slink.

292 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

What can save them ? This can save them. See the token sent of God,

See the gleaming brazen serpent coiled around the Prophet’s rod !

And as, rescued by that symbol, Israel sought the path to find,

So do ye, oh strengthened nations, seek the goal of all mankind !

Philosophy

(Exod. 13:21; Deut. 34.)

Forth, oh wise and lovely peoples, to the goal which God hath placed !

Ah, but how discern the pathway mid the phantoms of the waste?

See, a fiery pillar leads us when the shadows dim the light !

’Tis the glow of Thought that shineth as a beacon in the night.

Through the noon-tide haze before us goes a cloud-white pillar fair.

Woven all of pure ideals, and God’s spirit dwelleth there.

Last, a poet-seer on Nebo shouts exulting from the peak:

“Look, our Father’s home is yonder! Forward to the land ye seek!”

The central conviction embodied in the poem is that of the lines

Go forth, Mankind ! be glad, thy cares at rest ;

Thou bear’st Eternity within thy breast.

Like Emerson, Rydberg believes in the direct revelation of the
divine through our individual consciousness ; this is for him the
full and satisfactory proof of immortality. Remarkable in the poem
is the sustaining of the allegory throughout. A more vital academic
ode has perhaps never been written.

Rydberg is particularly fond of the allegory of life. He often
uses the storm at sea, but we may note also the dream, the tree,
battle, and twice besides its use in the “Cantata” the pilgrimage or
quest by land. His storm poems contain the most effective pictures.
In “Shipwreck” is symbolized the destruction of youthful illusions,
for Rydberg is never a man to shun the statement of fact as he sees
it. More extended in implication is “Snowfrid.” In this poem the
hero’s guardian spirit embarks with him in the tempest and they
sail together past the temptations of gold, power, and love, which
are depicted in truly Norse fashion. In the climax the guardian
spirit, Snowfrid, departs, leaving the hero to battle alone with the
waves. Her parting words have the stern challenge of a warrior-
spirit’s ideal :

Choosest thou me,

Thou choosest the storm.

A superb example of the quest motive occurs in “Longing.”
Here a man is pictured as catching glimpses of the divine in the
flower, the sunset, organ music, etc., but as wandering ever further,

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

293

unsatisfied. Even should he reach World’s Ending, his gaze would
strain forward.

Then, leaning o’er the steep there,

He’d cry into the deep there, —

That echoless, vast Untrod, —

And onward the shout should go where
Is naught but the void of Nowhere,

Go ringing through Chaos : “God !’’

The note of pantheistic feeling in the last quotation is like pass¬
ages in Matthew Arnold. Many other resemblances between the
two might be pointed out. In such poems as “Rugby Chapel” and
“The Future” Arnold gives us allegories of life with emphasis laid
on the motives of quest and struggle. Classic objectivity and pre¬
cision of style is likewise common to these poets. The most funda¬
mental similarity, however, is the presence in both of what Professor
Irving Babbitt, in his essay on Arnold 1 defines as the modern spirit.
Citing Goethe, Sainte-Beuve and Renan, Professor Babbitt formu¬
lates the definition : The modern spirit is synonymous with the posi¬
tive and critical spirit, the refusal to take things on authority. — It
is because, like Arnold, Rydberg insists on wrestling anew with
the great problems of life that his allegories have the qualities of
intimacy and intensity. The convention of the method is forgotten
in the personality of the tone. Rydberg is more Christian and
(therefore, may we not say?) more optimistic than Arnold; he also,
for reasons already indicated, exercises a wider influence upon his
fellow-countrymen. Though Arnold was the senior by six years
and began to publish poetry much sooner, there is no evidence that
he affected either the thought or the form of his Swedish con¬
temporary.

But a clear evidence of indebtedness to English verse appears on
transferring our attention to Poe. In the first place, Rydberg made
spirited versions of “The Raven” and “The Bells,” translations in
which, though much is lost, something is gained. The Swedish poems,
if not equal to the originals, are like new creations of emotional
power and melodic beauty, which deserve to stand among the best
of their kind in any language. More important, Rydberg assimilated
the musical magic of Poe into his verse, where it became of hardly
less value than the neo-classic lyricism of “Faust.” In an original

1 The Nation, New York, Aug. 2, 1917.

294 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

poem, also entitled “Bells,” we find life again symbolized, but this
time more remotely, with an ethereal loveliness of form which, as
with Poe, is an end in itself. The picture of the demon is but the
confirmation of previous hints. And yet how much finer, both in
purpose and in form, is Rydberg’s allegory than the acrobatic felicity
of Poe’s “tintinnabulations,” etc. !

THE BELLS

Transparent and ethereal above the sea of Time
A tower all of crystal uprears its form sublime.

The walls of its foundation sink down abysmally

More deep than any thought can reach or any eye can see!

It rises to the starry heavens, it pierces through and through,

Until it leaves the last lone star behind it in the blue;

It lifts its airy belfry through space to such a height
That man’s imagination reels in terror at the flight.

Two bells there are suspended within that belfry’s dome,

The first was wrought of dawn-light that streamed ere day had come.

It sways its golden clapper when flitting thoughts have birth,

And softly chimes in concord with the breathing of the Earth

But, though it chimes so softly, it has a warning tone
Which with a clear vibration sinks down from zone to zone,

And dies away on earth here with murmur faint and low
In the unrest of noble souls and in the sunset’s glow.

How earnestly, how gently it prompts the chosen few
To dream high dreams, and strive then to make those dreams come true.
Reminding them each evening by sunset’s flaming spell
Of distant, undiscovered lands where Truth and Beauty dwell.

Entreatingly it urges to haste the holy hour

When all men shall be brothers through Love’s uniting power,

When each heart shall find comfort by soothing hands caressed,

Each weary head repose at last on a beloved breast.

Entreatingly it urges mankind to rise up strong

And join with its pure accents in one vast freedom-song,

To send the joyous tidings across the world’s wide rim:

Behold the Earth is God s domain, and all men worship Him !

But ah ! the other bell-form was filled with molten gloom
That clung within the darkness of Chaos’ dismal womb.

The heavy clapper moves not, all hushed and dumb its might,

The hollow of the bell is like the vaulted depth of night.

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

295

And just below the belfry there sits in sombre thought
A demon, with his fingers around the bell-rope caught.

Unmoving as a statue, he gazes grimly down

On Time’s loud-roaring billows that go past beneath his frown.

The billows yet are gleaming, the sun yet shines on high, —

But should a fearsome blackness o’ershadow all the sky,

And the last wave be broken amid the weltering foam
That rocked the poet’s visioned hope of fairer life to come;

If blank despair should fall on the struggling human race,

The freedom-song be silenced by cravings weak or base,

And, numb with cold, the heart of youth perceive without a throe
The holy form of Goodness leave the Earth with fading glow ;

Then sudden on the bell-rope the hands would clench more tight,

Then would the demon tug there with mad and fierce delight,

The awful Bell of Darkness would swing its mighty round,

And all the trembling Universe be shattered by the sound.

As Rydberg’s world is chiefly a world of ideas, not of time and
place, we are not surprised at discovering that he uses the Bible,
Greek and Norse mythology, and various epochs of history to il¬
lustrate his philosophy. We can but mention “Dexippos,” a battle
between the Greeks and Goths ; “Psyche,” from the classic myth ;
“Nero and the Lightning” and “The Martyrdom of Lucan,” from
Roman legend and history ; “The Virgin Mary in the Rose Garden,”
and “The Star of Bethlehem,” on themes of the New Testament; “In
the Church Cell,” a medieval conception ; “The Flying Dutchman,”
“Balder’s Pyre” and “The World Tree” from northern mythology.
In all of these pieces it is not the story but the latent symbolism
which is developed.

We might well pause to consider the special merits of any or all
of the poems just named, but three longer and more unusual works
claim our attention. “Life-Joy and Life-Loathing” is a sort of sym¬
posium of epicureans and stoics, in which the speakers are charac¬
ters ranging from the early Greek and Christian times to the pres¬
ent day. Careless joy is presented in a gay chorus of Grecian
youths and maidens, such a chorus as Goethe might well have writ¬
ten on such a theme. Then follow Christian ascetics, a priest of
Bacchus, Greek philosophers, Maecenas, a pope, and finally moderns,
some of them speaking in prose. The whole is full of high thought
and beauty, with a considerable flavor of irony toward the end in

296 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

describing the Intellectual Aristocrat. As is often the case with
Rydberg, no definite conclusion is given, unless we arbitrarily take
as such the final lines of the poem, which echo the voice of an early
anchorite :

Christ had fain redeemed Joy,

But Joy, alas ! would receive Him not.

Joy shall be strangled by Fear,

And Fear shall redeem the world.

Rydberg’s highest flight of sustained imagination is “Prome¬
theus and Ahasuerus,” a poem at once Aeschylean and Miltonic.
In a fine prose introduction the patriarch Noah, stepping out on a
ridge of the Caucasus just after the flood, discovers in a deep cleft
the titan Prometheus, tormented by the vulture. To him comes
(with contempt on the poet’s part for the charge of anachronism)
the wandering Jew, Ahasuerus. The rest of the piece is a Miltonic
dialogue on the right versus expedience, in majestic pentameters with
varied rhyme. Prometheus defends the Platonic maxim that the
soul should follow truth for itself without reference to earthly for¬
tune. He is made to impersonate the individual soul at war with
a lower god, — the god of the accepted social order and ecclesiastical
dogma, — beyond whom he appeals to the higher power of Right
revealed within his soul. At the conclusion Ahasuerus, the apostle
of things as they are, departs. Then above the chained titan bends
the form of the Messiah, to whom Prometheus says : 1

I see thee as before, thine eyes beseeching
And mildly whispering that when first my love
Is freed from hate and passion to revenge
Thou canst at length release me from my chains.

But the time is not yet; the Messiah disappears in the light of the
dawn, and the vulture, awakening, plunges down upon the titan and
strikes its claws into his breast.

Rydberg’s one poem of modern social life, “The New Cavern
Song, can hardly be called successful throughout. In substance it
is an allegory directed against modern industrial conditions, in
especial the exploitation of child labor. Again prose and verse are
mingled, the prose being the more effective of the two for the purpose
required. 1 he whole, though amorphous, contains penetrative think-

. ’Cki Shelley- Prometheus Unbound, Act I, 1. 633-4. Otherwise there is no

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

29 7

ing and deserves to be read carefully and sympathetically. There are
effective passages on the narrowness of the modem scientific spirit
and on the failure of a socialism which is inspired only by material¬
istic motives. In attacking institutional religion, Rydberg notes the
French saying: “the truest followers of Jesus are those who seem
to repudiate him.” Altogether “The New Cavern Song” is very im¬
portant in showing the poet’s ability to cope effectively with the
problems of to-day. The weakness of the piece is artistic, not
intellectual.

The verse of Rydberg, though so rich in thought and spirit, is
contained in one small volume, and we have already mentioned nearly
all of his important poems. Two phases of his work, however, still
remain untreated. We may take first his purely lyrical quality.
His command of meter has been partly illustrated, and his verbal
music alluded to, but this is not enough. Few poets equal Rydberg
in the gift of making his poetry as wings to his thought ; of the
moderns only Shelley surpasses him. Swinburne performs more
evolutions, but he is apt to confuse rather than to uplift. Rydberg
is too serious to indulge much in lyricism for its own sake, but he
has many shorter poems of the purest delicacy : as for instance “The
River to the Girl,” “The Kiss,” “Water Plashing,” “In the Night.”
He seldom duplicates his verse forms, handling complex stanzas,
quatrains, sonnets, Sapphics, etc., with equal sureness and appro¬
priateness. He is one of the masters whose form resists analysis;
it seems to have crystallized inevitably as we find it.

Poetry of the abstract and allegorical type is at present somewhat
out of fashion. It was in its heyday about 1800, being a by-product
of the theorizing that started the French Revolution, Schiller being
one of its best exponents. In Sweden it was cultivated in the shorter
pieces of Esaias Tegner, 1782-1846. Rydberg, with his wide sym¬
pathy and vigorous mentality, gave new power to this declining type.
But besides this principal service to his native poetry, Rydberg won
success in another field, that of idyllic verse. From his volume we
may cull half a dozen pictures of Swedish interiors and landscapes,
nearly always with the figures of children in the foreground. These
poems have a perennial charm, for if they do not exalt, at least they
are certain to delight.

Rydberg’s idylls, as we may call them, are a delicate blending of
realism and sentiment. This doubtless comes from the fact that they

298 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

were written in later life about scenes and events of his childhood.
Note the chief titles: “The Woodcut in the Hymn-Book,” “The
Brownie” (Tomten), “The Wood Nymph,” “The Bathing Children,
“The Dead Child to the Living,” “Childhood’s Poetry.” We should
here note that few great poets are as completely free from the motive
of sex as Rydberg. In his case it is a lack that is not felt to be a
deficiency. There is a large-hearted innocence in his nature which
is too rare to be risked for a sheaf of lyrics to Lesbia. As an
example both of this quality and of his idyllic freshness in general
we may take the following:

THE BATHING CHILDREN

Clumps of lilies-of-the-valley, daisies too on either hand
Fringe a small transparent brooklet gliding o’er its bed of sand ;

Hedges clad in snowy blossoms breathe their perfume manifold,

Maples o’er the water-lilies lean their boughs of green and gold.

Two small children, boy and girl, are sitting there amid the flowers,
Hawk-and-dove they’ve been a-playing all the warm long morning hours.
Says the boy, “I’m going bathing, it’s so hot here in the sun.”

“Yes, the water’s cool,” the girl says; “I’ll go bathing too. What fun!”

Soon the boy has cast his stockings and his other clothes aside,

Scattered on the ground about him, though the dew has not been dried.
Trousers with the splendid braces that his mother sewed for him,

Though discarded, show the roundness of each little chubby limb.

By this careless heap the maiden, far more orderly than he,

Lays her silk and linen garments, bright and pretty as can be ;

Lays her summer hat upon them with its ribbons all agleam,

And with shouts of joy the two then jump into the limpid stream.

Look ! to meet the merry children how the brook’s clear waters leap,
Round their fresh and lovely bodies cuddling wavelets kiss and creep ;
Pearly drops fly all around them high above the streamlet’s brim,

Where the boy with glad endeavor shows his playmate how to swim.

If she learn, he’ll fill her basket full of nuts, a princely treat.

How she sprawls and kicks and splashes with her plump and dainty feet!
How she stretches out first one arm, then the other, while she rests
With the boy’s firm hands upholding underneath her tender breasts !

Meanwhile from her new-built dwelling in a bending maple tree,
Twittering, a sparrow-mother spies the two, and thus thinks she:
“Though they have no wings to fly with, yet their antics are the same
As when I and sparrow-father played in youth the splashing game.”

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

299

So too when the lark above them, poising on his outstretched wing,

Sees the innocents at play there, loud his throbbing quavers ring,

Like an echo of the gladness that resounded to the skies
When the first lark sang his rapture o’er the groves of Paradise.

To summarize fairly the worth of Rydberg is difficult, if not
impossible. To many thousands of his admirers he represents the
finest in spiritual stimulus that poetry can give. Again, it is possible
to regard him with distant respect, as a personality apart from our
life and its needs. But even for critics of the second type there are
the idylls touched with a morning glow of the truest feeling. To
the academic and philosophic mind he will always be a man to be
reckoned with. As a literary craftsman he ranks close to the best,
though this fact is only fully evident in the original. He is the
greatest idealistic poet of Sweden, and, it seems no more than fair
to assert, one of the leaders in his type during the nineteenth century.

Note: The translations in this article are taken by permission from An
Anthology of Swedish Lyrics, published by the American- Scandinavian
Foundation, New York, and the Oxford Press, London.

ACT FOUR OF THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
ON THE STAGE

Clarence Stratton

Director of English in the High Schools, Cleveland

WHEN the story in The Merchant of Venice swings into the
fourth act, anticipation has indicated that there will follow
the highest point of the plot, the culminating action of the
complications. Shakespeare answered all the demands of this impor¬
tance. Not only is his mastery of dramatic construction revealed in
this act, the absolute simplicity of his means to obtain the maximum
effect is amazing. This stage device of hoisting a villain with his
own petard, Shakespeare uses as unerringly as any modern manipu¬
lator of situations.

This fourth act is not only the most dramatic in intensity, it is
longest in continuity, for the second scene is so short and so closely
related to the trial scene that it may be considered a part of it. In
productions on the stage it is either combined with the courtroom
scene or omitted entirely.

The trial scene is not only dramatic and long, it is spacious. No
matter how it may have been set in the Elizabethan theater, modern
producers have taken advantage of all available stage space to repro¬
duce the impression of dignity and size of the Venetian court. More
persons are needed to support the progressive steps of the action ;
more can be used than in any previous scenes.

In view of the apparent requirements of the trial scene, and the
obvious chances for stage groups and ensemble movements, it is
rather amazing to find one commentator suggesting that “this scene
might be in a diagonal setting where the left side is taken up with
the raised platform for the Doge ; in front of it the lawyers’ table, at
which, in the very center of the stage, stands Portia. To her left and
in front of her, stands Antonio ; on her right, at the end of the law¬
yers’ table, in advance of Antonio, and the nearest character to the
footlights, stands Shylock. Bassanio is on the platform, among the

301

302 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

nobles around the Doge.” ( Variorum , p. 393-) The objection to
such a stage arrangement is that it reduces the size of the Court,
which in itself should impress the spectators. The full stage should
be used for this scene. Every producer has attempted by decoration
and furniture to reflect the glory of ATenice, but not all have used
both fresco and drapery, as some critics report. It is unfortunate
that so many reviewers of plays are not more definite in their re¬
marks. One writes that this scene is made real ‘‘by guards and
groups, by stately ceremonials, by a deft employment of pages within
and a mob without, and by correctness of dramatic treatment.”
(Winter, W., Shakespeare on the Stage.)

How were the pages employed within, the mob without? And
exactly what was done on the stage to justify the phrase “correctness
of dramatic treatment”? If we could settle upon the elements rightly
indicated by those words, we should have solved the entire problem
of the presentation of Shakespearean drama.

Whether few or many persons are in the Court all action during
the early part of this scene should point to the Duke. Whether he be
dressed in cloth of silver, or of gold, or in crimson velvet, he should
by his actions and speech show the dignity of his position, the ripe¬
ness of his experience, the force of his power, and the depth of his
knowledge.

In Sir Henry Irving’s version “the magnificoes, seated to the
auditor’s right in scarlet and ermine robes of state, the excited
crowds, the gorgeous scarlet-clad Portia contrasting with the dull-
hued Oriental appearance of Shylock, stamped an indelible impres¬
sion. Irving made a point in this scene by introducing among the
spectators a crowd of Jews, who took the greatest interest in the fate
of Shylock, laughing at his mordant jests, hanging on the words of
Portia, and despairing over the final decision of the court.” (O’Dell,
Shakespeare from Betterton to Irzing.)

A paragraph in The London Times in 1841 on Macready’s pro¬
duction explained that “to give every completeness to the plays at this
house, little bills are gratuitously distributed, containing descriptions
of the scenery, with a short notice of the usages of the time in which
the dramatic action is supposed to occur.”

Act IV. A Court of Justice. The arms on the tribunal of
Venice and her tributary states Istria, Candia, Cyprus, Dalmatia,
etc. In Venice, the tribunal for criminal cases and two others were

ACT FOUR OF THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 303

composed of forty judges, ordinarily presided over by one of three
selected from the Council of the Doge, and draughted for the most
part, if not wholly, from the members of the Senate. The Doge, on
all public occasions, was attended by his particular officers, knights,
esquires, captains, heralds, etc. The right of sitting in the councils
and on the tribunals was among his privileges.’’ (Quoted by O’Dell.)

Kean in 1858 took costumes from Veccellio and Jost Amman and
all architecture from actual buildings. He set Act IV in the Hall
of the Senators.

“Dumb magnificoes, the subordinate officers, the clerks, heralds,
and secretaries, the spectators crowded in the galleries and doorways,
all demonstrate the same interest and produce a succession of pictures
in which nothing is out of keeping, but which satisfy the eye and
critical judgment.” (Cole, quoted by O’Dell.)

When Shylock appears interest should be focused upon him. Only
during a few speeches does it pass from him to Portia; and even
during them or most of them, the spectators are as much held by
Shylock’s reacting as they are by Portia’s acting. Some performers
have forced attention upon Shylock by grouping the other characters
into the background and corners.

It is extremely unfortunate that we have no detailed records of
the methods by which actors before Macklin preserved throughout
the trial scene the comic aspects of Shylock’s role. Reading even his
first speech now, we wonder how this section could have been inter¬
preted humorously. The man who said so simply, “What judgment
shall I dread, doing no wrong?” was a human creature before he was
a usurer. What an experience it must have been to sit through
Macklin’s delineation in 1741, when he made Shylock stand like a
tower, strong in the justice of his pleas, asking no favors, bound to
please no one, no thing, except “a lodged hate and a certain loathing.”

The delineation by Macklin has been the basis of all successive
interpretations. As Shylock has no speech to deliver immediately
upon his entrance, the actor has an excellent opportunity to act, to
strike the note, as it were, of the first part of his scene. Booth, it
is recorded (Winter, W., Shakespeare on the Stage ) “showed an
awful composure of inherent evil which may be noted in the observant
stillness of a deadly reptile, aware of its potency, and in no haste,
although unalterably determined to make use of it,” all through the
speech of the Duke, ending with the request for a gentle answer.

304

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

The actions during Shylock’s first speech as reported of Booth may
be taken as almost the convention of all performers since. “Booth’s
movements were slow, precise, exact, predominant, massive, as of
inexorable power ; his face was rigid and pale ; his eyes burned
darkly ; there was an occasional tinge of grisly humor in his delivery :
the total effect was that of the vibrant, observant poise of a deadly
reptile, aware of its lethal potency, and in no haste, although un¬
alterably determined to make use of it.” This phase of Shylock’s
character became evident when he announced :

And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn
To have the due and forfeit of my bond.

The long speech in which these lines occur gives opportunity for
frequent changes of manner. At his first question, “Is it answered?”
Mr. E. H. Sothern said that Shylock should assume a dignity lacking
before — dignity of conscious power. The growing intensity of feel¬
ing towards the conclusion of this speech has been marked by all
actors. Shylock has ceased to address the Duke; he is speaking
directly to Antonio and his friends, although he may pretend still to
address the Court.

“It really seemed that Antonio must fall death stricken beneath
the gaze of that remorseless Shylock (Kean) ere the bloody penalty
could be exacted.” (Coleman.)

“Nothing could be more significant of a comprehension of Shy¬
lock’s nature, and nothing could be finer as dramatic art, than Irving’s
cold, wolfish glare and his demeanor of indomitable purpose in con¬
fronting the merchant in the Court.” (Winter.)

Corroboration of these details is found in the notes of Booth him¬
self: “Bow to the Duke. At Bassanio’s exclamation draw yourself

up, your back toward him, and speak contemptuously, without look¬
ing at him.”

Richard Mansfield made Shylock’s demeanor indicate cool con¬
viction of imminent success, essentially horrible. (Winter.)

Most reviewers have limited themselves to reporting how the
actor has delivered his lines, whereas more valuable information
might have been transmitted had they set down what he did when
ie was not speaking. Quite as important on the stage as acting is
reacting While Antonio is trying to dissuade his friends from
wasting breath in his behalf, “I pray you, think your question with

ACT FOUR OF THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 305

the Jew,” Shylock could not remain impassive. Booth directed that
he should listen to all this with an expression of mockery.

“In the trial scene by-play in the circle of his friends is indis¬
pensable on the part of Antonio. As the poet has given Antonio but
few words to say, he must in dumb show fully and warmly, express
his gratitude to Portia, which is unfortunately much neglected by
actors. Portia, too, must emphasize this by-play.

“At every step of the trial Bassanio must portray in all possible
ways through by-play his distress and anxiety as well as his boundless
joy over the deliverance of his friend, hard as it may be in a scene
which fills an entire act.” (Oechelhauser, Variorum, 460.)

Shy lock’s second explanation of his attitude should show the
patience of the victor with unseeing objectors, who are annoying in
a slight way, but who, after all, can do no more than delay a just
sentence. There is no vindictiveness displayed here, though quite
naturally, a man may call fie upon the laws which so many persons
here in open court seem to misunderstand. Booth noted that this
whole speech, beginning “What judgment shall I dread, doing no
wrong?” should be delivered respectfully but firmly. At its conclu¬
sion, “I stand for judgment. Answer; shall I have it?” the great
tragedian wrote, “Bow as you ask.”

This point marks the end of the first emotional wave, so far as
Shylock is concerned. He has stated his position admirably, he has
answered or ignored the party of the defendant, he has appealed to
the laws, the reputation of Venice. The Duke has been put into a
situation where he must decide — unless the dramatist has provided
some interruption, some change in the current of events.

Nerissa enters dressed like a lawyer’s clerk. This direction con¬
cerning costume is usually fulfilled by dressing her in a long black
gown with a black cap.

In the succeeding few minutes there is an evidence of the mar¬
velous power of Shakespeare’s foresight in providing little bits of
action to cover necessary but not important stage business. While
the Duke reads the letter handed him by Nerissa, Shylock whets his
knife.

“Novelli sat on steps before the desk, removed one of his red
morocco slippers, laid it across his lap, sharpened his knife upon it,
and tried its edge on a hair plucked from his beard.” (Winter.)

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

306

“It is reported that Edwin Forrest carried a whetstone into court
to sharpen his knife.” (Winter.)

Few directors allow Gratiano to do what he undoubtedly would
do if the events were actual, but at times he is allowed to kick the
sitting or kneeling Jew. I have heard a murmur of indignant sym¬
pathy for the old man surge over a theater audience at this. When
Gratiano, continuing his tirade, tells that “Thou almost mak’st me
waver in my faith,” Shylock, as impersonated by practically all actors,
does a perfectly natural thing. Booth wrote that here he “looks up
at him with mocking wonder. During the rest of this speech he
slowly takes from his bosom the bond, and at its close, points to the
seal, still kneeling.”

So far through this scene there is no indication that Shylock
should be acted as a figure for derision. The demands seem to be,
as already set down, for dignity.

“Kean represented Shylock as an injured and pathetic figure
instead of presenting him as an object for the scoffs and scorns of
the gallery, as most actors did at this time. This change caused con¬
siderable debate; essays and pamphlets were written.” (Mallory.)

While Shylock is the most arresting figure in this act a producer
must dispose of every person on the stage, even down to the lowest
page. The significance of the Jew is not lessened by the arrival of
Portia. The actress, to reproduce accurately the role of civil doctor,
should wear an upper robe of black damask, of velvet or silk. The
under garment should be of black silk with a black sash. Ellen
Terry costumed herself in flaming red. This was wrong historically,
but, of course, theatrically effective. The disposition of Portia is a
delicate pioblem for the director. She appears actually as the judge,
not as an advocate. She should, therefore, sit on the judgment-seat
near or below the Duke’s throne. Most arrangements provide her
with a lectern on the floor of the courtroom. Booth directed that she
should go to a table on the dais facing the Duke. Dramatic effect is
always considered in placing her advantageously.

<Vhen Mrs. Clive acted this role she realized that she needed more
than her ability to hold the audience. She adopted the cheap device
of imitating the peculiarities of noted lawyers or judges, diverting
attention from the action of the plot and even inciting laughter.
Gratiano alone in this scene is the injector of comic relief.

Everyone knows how the “quality of mercy” speech should be

ACT FOUR OF THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 30 7

delivered ; everyone knows how seldom it is spoken as it should be.
I believe the only actress I have heard deliver it as though she was
speaking it for the first time was one at the Shakespeare festival in
Stratford-on-Avon in 1914.

It is reported that Macklin and his daughter were estranged for
years because they could not agree upon the right emphasis for one
of the phrases. Booth noted that, at the mention of God, Shylock
should bow reverently, though none of the Christians do. Cooke did
this also, explaining that it was part of Macklin’s business. May
this be one of the traditional bits going back to Shakespeare’s own
day ? Cooke shook his head and waved his hand in denial that this
plea for mercy concerned him. Irving listened with weariness and
contempt; all this was irrelevant. His answer to it was abrupt and
final. At the award Shylock is radiant ; every actor has made him
kiss the hem of Portia’s robe, some by stooping over, most by kneel¬
ing. Portia during these speeches changes from the mild persuading
councilor to the implacable administrator of the law. This was
remarkably shown by Ada Rehan. Shylock’s answer to the sugges¬
tion that she tear the bond was early delivered solemnly ; Kean inter¬
preted it as the ironical joke of an assured claimant; Cooke dreaded
lest the bond should be torn before the forfeit was paid.

Macready’s essential conception of Shylock’s nature was concen¬
trated in the exultant cruelty with which he quoted from the bond
the three words, “nearest his heart.” When he has been urged to
“do so much for charity” Cooke and Macklin uttered a savage sneer,
but Kean delivered a delighted chuckle. Which is the more true to
human nature is of less consequence than which has the greater effect
upon the audience. The immediately following speeches give the
silent Shylock the opportunity of corroborating the interpretation he
has already made apparent. Booth indicated impatience ; he emitted
a sneer at the protestations. Others hardly suggested the depth and.
power of the Jew’s passion until the reverse had come. As the
realization of this change swept over him most actors have stood
petrified, ignoring the taunts of Gratiano. Kean forced from his
throat with a long struggle separating the two phrases, “Is that— the
law ?” then collapsed.

Every producer is likely to change stage business during a run.
Thus Booth provided alternatives in his notes. When Portia says,
“He shall have merely justice and his bond,” she descends from the

3o8 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

dais, gives the bond to Shylock. The latter throws the bond at
Antonio’s feet. Or she may throw the bond at Shylock’s feet, and
he may trample upon it wrathfully. Kean, we are told, displayed
trembling anxiety to obtain what he had already refused. He was
still vindictive but abjectly avaricious.

Heine’s famous remark concerning this scene illustrates the sym¬
pathy of most modern audiences. “When I saw this play at Drury
Lane there stood behind me in the box a pale fair Briton, who at the
end of the fourth act fell to weeping passionately, several times
exclaiming, ‘The poor man is wronged.’ ” As a contrast to this the
opinion of Ulrici that Shylock has the flavor of comedy about him
at the trial is worth considering. Kean, having made the audience
hate him, won them to pity when he uttered, “Nay, take my life
and all.”

According to Booth, Shylock should shrink ; and at the word
“Christian” utter a short, sharp groan, stagger backward, and raise
his right hand with the palm upward — face also upraised, with a look
of utter despair, until the Duke has spoken, then collapse.

Beerbohm Tree weakly prostrated himself upon the floor. Other
actors make Shylock drop to his knees, clasping his head. He stag¬
gers to his feet as Portia speaks.

Hawkins wrote of Kean: “The sudden change of Shylock’s
whole appearance when the cause turned against him; the happy
pause in ‘I am — content,’ as if it almost choked him to bring out the
word; the partial bowing down of his inflexible will when he said,
‘I pray you give me leave to go from hence, I am not well,’ the horror
of his countenance when told of his enforced conversion to Chris¬
tianity, and, to crown all, the fine mixture of scorn and pity with
which he turned and surveyed the ribald Gratiano — all exhibited a
succession of studies to which words fail to do justice. He retired,
as Shakespeare intended he should retire, with the audience possessed
in his favor.”

Richard Mansfield suggested by producing the knife again that
Shylock wounds himself to avoid signing the deed.

One actor introduced some Jewish friends into this scene. At
this point Shylock fell fainting into their arms and was borne from
the court.

Modern stage business is to take leave with the air of a martyr

ACT FOUR OF THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 309

going to execution, giving a tragic climax. The original Italian story
provides for the opposite effect. Modern Shylocks, with trembling
dignity, put up a hand to ward Gratiano off, then totter from the
court. Many critics assert that with this exit interest in the story
ceases.

The most recent production in the United States added to Shy-
lock’s last few moments as many theatric devices as the mind of one
producer could conceive. He clung to Gratiano for support. Flung
from him he clutched another man, by whom he drew himself up.
As he raised his head he saw it was Antonio. With a guttural sob
he flung from him. But a pale-faced monk raised before him a
crucifix, pointing at it menacingly. Shylock cringed, then paced past
it, and out of sight. So far all this was quite effective, but the
impression of his exit was nullified by a taunting cry outside from
the gathered mob who had heard of his predicament.

Booth directed that Shylock should raise both head and hands as
if about to appeal to Portia, check himself, and say very slowly, as
head and hands drop, “I am content.” His last words are uttered
plaintively. As Shylock is leaving Gratiano seizes his left arm, and
at the conclusion of the taunting speech with which he addresses him,
casts Shylock’s hand from him. Shylock bows low to the Duke, and
slowly totters towards the door ; he meets Antonio, and shrinks with
abhorrence; raises his hand (as on previous occasions), which slowly
descends upon the back of his head as it droops upon his breast-
falls against the door, which slowly opens. The curtain should be
“timed” to Shylock’s exit.

“Booth, and many others, ended the play with the exit of Shy¬
lock.”

This last statement has been repeated so frequently that it is
almost a truism of stage history. It may have been true of some of
Booth’s productions, but not all. He devised a different manner of
concluding the play, a manner so unexpected that I shall reproduce it
here. Recently there came into my possession a slender volume :
The Merchant of Venice as Produced at the Winter Garden Theater
of New York, January, i86y, by Edwin Booth. A New Adaptation
to the Stage. A book dealer has written this note upon a flyleaf :
“Nearly the whole of this edition was destroyed by fire at the burning
of the Winter Garden Theatre shortly after the publication.”

3io

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

In this version the plav does not end with the exit of Shylock,
but after the following peculiar telescoping of all the remainder of
the material :

Grat.

Duke.

Por.

Duke.

Bass.

Por.

Ant.

Bass.

Grat.

Por.

In christ’ning thou shalt have two godfathers ;

Had I been judge thou should’st have had ten more,

To bring thee to the gallows, not the font.

[Exit Shylock.

Sir, I entreat you with me home to dinner.

I humbly do desire your Grace of pardon :

I must away this night toward Padua,

And it is meet I presently set forth.

I am sorry that your leisure serves you not.

Antonio, gratify this gentleman,

For in my mind, you are much bound to him.

[Exeunt Duke, Magnificoes, and Train. Portia
and Nerissa retire up the stage and throw off
their disguises.

[Going up the stage with Antonio and friends .]

Most worthy gentleman —

You are all amazed:

Here is a letter, read it at your leisure ;

It comes from Padua, from Bellario:

There you shall find that Portia was the Doctor;

Nerissa, there, her clerk. Antonio,

I have better news in store for you.

Than you expect: unseal this letter soon;

There you shall find, three of your argosies
Are richly come to harbor suddenly.

You shall not know by what strange accident
I chanced on this letter.

I am dumb.

Were you the Doctor, and I knew you not?

Were you the clerk —

You are not satisfied
Of these events at full. Let us go in;

And charge us there upon interrogatories,

And we will answer all things faithfully.

[Exeunt.

Knowing such facts about earlier productions, we can be doubly
grateful for the care of producers in attempting to interpret this play
both more naturally and effectively.

THE PLACE OF THE BOOK OF LUKE IN
LITERATURE

W. O. Sypherd

Professor of English, University of Delaware

TO those of us who have been accustomed to think that Biblical
writing, or Biblical style if you will, attains, in its kind, close
to perfection, a recent dissenting note from Mr. J. Middleton
Murry fairly constitutes a challenge to defend. It certainly forces
us with right good will to question the almost unanimous testimony
of judges of good writing, of literature, that the Bible is one of the
world’s literary masterpieces. For, Mr. Murry says that “a great
part of the historical books of the Old Testament, the gospels in the
New, are examples of all that writing should not be” ; and, further,
“that the following proposition must be accepted in any consideration
of style: The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan, is, as a whole, in¬
finitely superior in point of style to the narrative of the Authorized
Version of the Gospels.” 1

The conventional estimate of the literary merits of the Bible,
I suppose, hardly needs any illustration. I am tempted, however,
for purposes of contrast, to quote several expressions of opinion.
“Priests, atheists, sceptics, devotees, agnostics, and evangelists are
generally agreed,” says Professor Phelps, “that the Authorized Ver¬
sion of the English Bible is the best example of English Literature
that the world has ever seen. . . . The art of English composition
reached its climax in the pages of the Bible.” 2 Walter Pater 3 re¬
fers thus to the greatness of the literary art of the Bible : “It is in the
quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety,
its alliance to great ends, or its depth of the note of revolt, or the
largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends,
as the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Miserables, The English

1 The Problem of Style, p. 135.

3 Human Nature in the Bible, pp. IX and X.

3 Appreciations, p. 36.

3”

312

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Bible, are great art.” “The English Bible,” says Frederic Harrison,1
“is the true school of English Literature. It possesses every quality
of our language in its highest form- — except for scientific precision,
practical affairs, and philosophic analysis. It would be ridiculous to
write an essay on metaphysics, a political article, or a novel in the
language of the Bible. But if you care to know the best that our
Literature can give in simple, noble prose — mark, learn, and inwardly
digest the Holy Scriptures in the English tongue.” And quite re¬
cently,2 the Honorable Stephen Coleridge compares the Authorized
Version of the Bible with the Bible in Modern Speech to illustrate
the immense difference between “what is noble and fine in style and
what is poor and third rate.”

Alongside these critical estimates, place Mr. Murry’s statement
about the style of certain books of the Bible, and we have a point
of departure for an impartial study of the qualities of Bible writing.
For the purpose of such a study let us take what is generally admitted
to be the most literary of the Gospels, the Book of Luke. What are
the literary qualities of this story of the life of Jesus? Are we
justified in saying that this gospel is good writing? Or, to ask a
bold specific question, “Is the King James Version of the Book of
Luke a Masterpiece of English Literature?”

Much as we should look with suspicion upon superlatives in lit¬
erary criticism, and particularly with respect to the Bible, about
which there has been so much loose writing and careless talk, we
cannot do better in a literary study of the Book of Luke than to start
with Renan’s now famous statement that “C’est le plus beau livre
qu’il y ait” 3 — the most beautiful or, shall we say, the finest book that
has ever been written. What did Renan mean by these words? He
used the phrase le plus beau intentionally; there is no doubt about
that. He spoke of the Gospel of St. Matthew as the most important
book that has ever been written, “le livre le plus important qui ait
jamais ete ecrit” ; and followed this statement by the equally signifi¬
cant remark about Luke. Let us have before us the significant parts
of Renan’s comment:

L fivangile de Luc est le plus litteraire des Evangiles. Tout y revele un
esprit large et doux, sage, modere, sobre et raisonnable dans l’irrationel. Ses
exagerations, ses invraisemblances, ses inconsequences tiennent a la nature

‘On English Prose,” The Nineteenth Century, vol. at, p. 402.

2 The Glory of English Prose, p. 9.

*Les Evangiles, Calmann-Levy, Lditeurs, Paris, pp. 282-83.

PLACE OF THE BOOK OF LUKE IN LITERATURE 313

meme de la parabole et en font le charme. Matthieu arrondit les contours un
peu secs de Marc; Luc fait bien plus; il ecrit, il montre une vraie entente de
la composition. Son livre est un beau recit bien suivit a la fois hebraique et
hellenique (prologue) joignant 1’emotion du drame a la serenite de l’idylle.
Tout y rit, tout y pleure, tout y chante; partout des larmes et des cantiques;
c’est l’hymne du peuple nouveau, l’hosanna des petits et des humbles introduits
dans le royaume de Dieu. Un esprit de sainte enfance, de joie, de ferveur,
le sentiment evangelique dans son originalite premiere repandent sur toute la
legende une teinte d’une incomparable douceur. On ne fut jamais moins
sectaire. Pas un reproche, pas un mot dur pour le vieux peuple exclu ; son
exclusion ne le punit-elle pas assez? C’est le plus beau livre qu’il y ait. Le
plaisir que l’auteur dut avoir a l’ecrire ne sera jamais suffisamment compris.”

Renan seems to be viewing here comprehensively the elements
which make for literary effectiveness — the theme, the spirit of the
work, the skill of the artist; the matter and the style; the thought or
the idea and the expression.

But as we consider Renan’s appreciative comment in our attempt
to determine the literary qualities of Luke’s Gospel, let us not lose
sight of two important considerations: First, Renan based his state¬
ment on the beauty or significance of the Book as it was presented to
him in the language of the original. Now admittedly the King James
Version of this book has a marked literary flavor of its own ; different
surely from that of the Greek original, and — what is a very rare
occurrence in a translation — possibly superior to it. With this noble
English version before us we might very easily attach more impor¬
tance than did Renan to the medium of expression considered, if it
is possible, as a thing apart from the subject matter. Or, to express
it in another way, Renan may have found the distinctive beauty of
the book in its theme, its material, and its spirit, rather than in the
medium of expression.1 And, second, Renan, regarding, as he did,
the great central figure of the Gospel solely as a human personality,
certainly did not have the emotional predispositions which most

1 From a different point of view but with what might seem to be an iden¬
tical conclusion, Mr. W. F. Adeney ( The New Century Bible, Luke, Intro¬
duction, p. 3) comments on the significance of this book : “Appreciative
readers of the New Testament have no desire to bring that volume, or any
part of it, into competition with the Symposium or Phcedo, with King Lear
or Hamlet. Its claims on our regard are to be found in other regions than
those assigned to the philosopher and the poet. But if the beauty of a book
lies deeper than grace of diction, strength of thought, wealth of imagination —
if we take into account the spirit of a work as well as its form, its subject
as well as its style, the moral and spiritual phases of the beautiful as well
as the sensuous and the intellectual, the claim for this gospel to be the most
beautiful of all books (Renan) may well be regarded as unapproachable.”

3H SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

Christians of to-day would bring to this story of the life and work
of Jesus. His judgment of the literary value of the Book might
therefore be much sounder than ours, might be, we may say, more
disinterested. Mr. Murry has said 1 that “the emotional suscepti¬
bility of the reader will vary with the degree of his belief” ; and also
that “one who believes in the divinity of Jesus will be more pro¬
foundly affected by the gospel narratives than one who does not.”
This theory is manifestly inapplicable in the case of Renan than
whom no other seems to have felt more intensely the essential beauty
of what was to this gifted French critic the marvelously effective
story of the life of an ideal human character.2

To Renan this “beauty” of the book lay first and last in the spirit
of the work. This spirit is embodied in its central figure, idealized
in words and deeds as they are presented to us by a deeply sympa¬
thetic follower, who at the same time was a conscious literary artist.
“The book,” says Renan, “is a splendid story well worked out. . . .
He [Luke] writes; he shows a true intent of composition. Over
the whole legend is cast a shade of an incomparable sweetness.”

But, still says our English critic, “the gospels ... (in the Au¬
thorized Version) are examples of all that writing should not be” ;
and “The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan is, as a whole, infinitely
superior in point of style to the narrative of the Authorized Version
of the Gospels.” Whether or no it may be at all possible to har¬
monize what seem to be such widely divergent views, we ought to
know what Mr. Murry conceives style to be. Here follows, I think,
the gist of his opinion:

“A true style is a completely adequate expression in language of a writer’s
mode of feeling. . . . Style is a quality of language which communicates pre¬
cisely emotions and thoughts, or a system of emotions or thoughts, peculiar
to the author. ... It is the expression that is inevitable and organic to an
individual mode of experience, an expression which, even when this exact
relation has been achieved, rises or falls in the scale of absolute perfection
according as the mode of experience expressed is more or less significant and
universal— more or less completely embraces, is more or less adequate to,
the whole of our human universe. . . . Style is perfect when the communica-

1 The Problem of Style, p. 132.

The comment of Lafcadio Hearn ( Books and Habits, p. 93) may also
not be unapropos: “Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since
Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how
beautiful it was.

PLACE OF THE BOOK OF LUKE IN LITERATURE 315

tion of the thought or emotion is exactly accomplished; its position in the
scale of absolute greatness, however, will depend upon the comprehensiveness
of the system of emotions and thoughts of which the reference is perceptible.”

This is, I think, we shall all admit an admirable definition of
“style” — that is, if this is what we conceive style to be, and if we
are content to use the word only in this sense. In this sense, I, for
one, agree with Mr. Murry that Renan’s Life of Jesus is infinitely
superior in style to the Book of Luke. But, two questions are at
once to be asked. Do we think of style only as an adequate expres¬
sion in language of a writer’s mode of feeling? Is it to be thus
limited and particularized in meaning ? and further, Does our accept¬
ance of the superiority in style, in this sense of the word, of, say,
Renan’s Life, carry with it the inferiority of, say, the Book of Luke
as literature? To both questions, I should answer, No.

With the more or less well established uses of the word “style,”
we are all familiar. We hear, for instance, of an American style.1
Mr. W. B. Yeats refers thus to “an English style” : “If somebody
could make a style which would not be an English style, and yet
would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire
from him, and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry
in Ireland.” 2 And there does seem to be a certain intangible flavor
or prevailing characteristic in the writings of the Bible to which we
attach the term “Biblical style.” Then we must recognize the dif¬
ferent interpretations or meanings of the word “style” that have been
aptly used by different critics in their evaluations of the qualities of
literary art. I enumerate a few of such meanings, or definitions as
they may be called, overlapping and not mutually exclusive, but
indicating in the main, different points of view: “Adequate exact
expression”; “effective expression” ; “personal expression” (“style est
l’homme meme,” or “sa maniere de s’exprimer”) ; “superficial beauty,
the beauty of the fabric” ; “permanent literary expression” ; “a cer¬
tain absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its in¬
tensity and colour”; “the fusion of the personal and the universal,
the complete realization of a universal significance in a personal and
particular expression.”

The Book of Luke would answer readily to some of these defining

1 Sherman, S. P., “Have We a Style That Is Recognizably American?” —
Bookman, November, 1922.

1 Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 1.

3 16 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

phrases; it will not fit in with Mr. Murry’s definition. Consider it
as an illustration of any one of these definitions, and we have made
little progress toward a just evaluation of its literary qualities. For
even admitting, for the moment, that the Book of Luke has no “style,”
we should all agree that Luke’s story of the life of Jesus is far greater
as literature than is Renan’s Life of Jesus , the “style” of which Mr.
Murry has put on so distinguished a plane. But neither this gener¬
alization nor any attempt to judge the book on the basis of “style”
will suffice. On a broader, sounder basis of the kind of writing to
which it belongs and of the special characteristics which this kind of
writing displays, we shall be able much better to answer the question.
What are the literary qualities of the Book of Luke?

The Book of Luke is a masterpiece of popular biographical litera¬
ture personalized by the touch of a conscious literary artist. It is in
its essence popular biographical narrative; literature of the people, if
I may use this phrase without any of the implications which accom¬
pany it if used to indicate a theory of composition. The material is
to a certain extent common property; known practically to all of that
little group of Christians of the first century for whom Luke con¬
sciously put together what he regarded as the essential facts in the
Life of Jesus. True, this is Luke’s own working over of the materia!
which was a common possession of the people. But the author, even
in this most literary of the gospels, counts for little. The deeds of a
great idol of the people, handed down by word of mouth, or trans¬
mitted in writing, are here collected, and brought into proper relation
one with the other.

This popular biographical narrative of Luke is, personalized,
given literary distinction if you will, by the touch of the conscious
literary artist. Luke has a plain unvarnished tale to tell. He tells
it directly. He used none of the imagery of the poets ; none of the
subtle interpretive characterizing of the psychologist : he merely tells
us what Jesus said and did, and how what he said and did influenced
his little world about him. Here is fact unfused by the imagination.
Rather it is fact spiritualized, vivified, by emotion, the emotion of one
who has seen or heard and felt ; it is fact breathed upon by the gentle
spirit of the lover of the ideal of human character as incarnated in
the person of Jesus. Luke’s story is an illustration of Mr. Wood-
berry’s statement 1 that “biography succeeds best when the subject of
1 The Appreciation of Literature, p. 147.

PLACE OF THE BOOK OF LUKE IN LITERATURE 317

it and the circumstances of his life and the events of his career are
described with the closest approximation to imaginative method so
that he lives and is seen with the clean vitality of characters in
a novel.” It is as a beautiful revelation of the ideal in human life
that this Book of Luke may be classed as a masterpiece of bio¬
graphical literature.

The Book of Luke is then to he judged as a bit of popular
biography. It is simple, straightforward biographical narrative, pre¬
sented in a form that would appeal to the audience whom Luke
addressed, an audience of whom Theophilus stood as an exponent,
an audience, we may assume, which was unliterary, unlearned, un-
intellectual, but emotional, devoted, and responsive to a plain setting
forth of the ideal character of their Master. Different fundamentally
from other kinds of biographical literature is this Book of Luke;
from Renan’s Life of Jesus, as I have before said, a view, an inter¬
pretation, proceeding from the reflective studies of a modern critic,
and addressed to a learned audience; or from Strachey’s Queen l ic-
toria, an intimate life story of the great Queen, made significant by
the intelligent criticism and appraisal of a gifted thinker and essayist ;
or from Bryce’s Biographical Studies, which are, I suppose, in their
almost purely expository aspects and in their intellectual appeal the
farthest removed from Luke's simple narrative.

It is popular story. Place Renan's Life of Jesus and Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King in a class by themselves; and over against these
works of fine literary art, place the simpler stories, the Book of Luke
and Sir Thomas Malory’s romance of King Arthur: and we shall
have a not inadequate conception of the place in literature which
Luke’s old story should occupy. In both Luke and Malory, the
material, the method, and the manner, or in other words the parts
played by the compiler and composer are, mutatis mutandis, identical.
Each book is a great work of popular story, perfected by an indi¬
vidual, a literary artist. But how different from Renan’s Life and
Tennyson’s Idylls, we have but to read to realize.

For both Renan and Tennyson are at the farthest remove from
men like Luke and Malory. Luke and Malory assemble, select,
arrange, and give a certain amount of unity to material which may
be thought of as being in the common possession of the people, and
which they as writers are content to transmit in, may we say, a
sublimated form. They do not invent; they do not interpret; they

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

318

do not let this old material pass through the successive distillations
which produce finally the finished, pure individualized essence.
Renan and Tennyson have focused on their material the intense spir¬
itual rays of their inmost consciousness. They have presented to us
their “story” in “language which communicates precisely emotions
and thoughts . . . inevitable and organic to an individual mode of
experience.” In each of these two groups of writers, however, the
medium of expression was appropriate and adequate to the purpose,
the audience, and the moment.

And as now we come back finally to the King James Version of
the Book of Luke, we feel that here, in its kind, we have a superb
piece of literature; maybe the best of its kind that we have in the
world’s literature. It is good writing. For in it subject matter and
expression are so fused together as to produce in English-speaking
people the emotion of supreme beauty. It is thus a masterpiece of
English Literature.

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD
Cornelius Weygandt

Professor of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania

IT is an old lament that the men who have seen the wonders of
the world have seldom written well of them. That they have
not is less often due to their inability to write than to their in¬
ability to see that wonders are wonders. Even when the men daily
in the presence of wonders have been writers their imaginations have
failed them and they have written about other things than these
before their eyes or they have jotted down the strangest experiences
as if they were keeping a ship’s log or making an entry in a child’s
diary. How is it that Sir Walter Raleigh could leave so dull a record
of his travels in Guiana or Lodge do a romance so artificial as
Rosalynde on the Spanish Main? That it was part of the Eliza¬
bethan convention to seek an escape from reality in such a farrago
as Euphuism may explain, or half-explain, Rosalynde. Why Raleigh
was content with so bare an account of his pushings toward Peru,
an Eldorado to his day, is harder guessing. You may say that the
picturesque, the unusual, the strange, were so constant accompani¬
ments of his journey that they lost significance to him, but your
guess only partly clears the puzzle.

If it had been only wonders of landscape that had been neglected
by writers who had the luck to visit new worlds we should not be
surprised, for the beauty of wild places was not recognized generally
until the eighteenth century. What surprises is that in the early
English Travels and in the English picaresque novels of travel so
like them, there is so little made of the customs and habits of people
in places oversea, and so little description of the ideals of alien
civilizations.

The old notion of the traveler that all customs and ideals that
differ from those of his homeland are barbarian is perhaps at the
root of the matter. Wonders were made little of by writers of

3i9

320 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

travels and of stories of travel because they were not held to be
wonders, but only queer ways of inferior peoples that were to be
despised, or, if not to be despised, to be ignored. Perhaps, often,
what might have been seen by understanding eyes as wonders were
not noticed at all.

And yet, back at the beginnings of literature, were the Odyssey
and Herodotus ! How could they be neglected as standard from the
moment of their resurrection by the Renaissance? Yet neglected
they were, and, in England, even in late Elizabethan and Jacobean
times, there were no better travel stories than the Jack Wilton (1594)
of Nash and no better book of travel than Coryatt’s Crudities (1611),
works in no way comparable to the great works of the Greeks.
Similar books of the succeeding centuries were little finer in quality.
Despite Sandys and Evelyn, Bruce and Kinglake, despite Mrs. Behn
and Defoe, Smollett and Melville, English literature had to wait until
late Victorian days for a really great book of travels and a really
great travel story. Doughty gave us Arabia Deserta in 1888 and
Conrad AlmayeCs Folly in 1895.

It is strange that the first writer of first power in English to see
as wonders what he experienced as man of action in daily routine
overseas should not be English by birth. Or, maybe, from another
point of view, it is not strange. Maybe if Conrad had been an Eng¬
lish sailor instead of a Pole turned English sailor by a yearning for
both sea and England unparalleled in history, he would not have
written his novels. Your typical English man of action feels that
he should not make much of his exploits and that writing about what
he has done may lead him into self-aggrandizement. His attitude is
at once fine and foolish and discreet. Such a man can seldom write
well enough to escape the many pitfalls that beset autobiography.
He is apt to lack the patience to learn to write exactly and to lack
the temperament to express himself with tact. He feels these limita¬
tions and can see no alternative to silence and what may sound like
boasting. Writing, too, is always difficult, a sweating of blood.
Taking all things into consideration, why not be wise and avoid the
difficulties by not writing at all about his adventures ?

To turn his experiences as man of action into a story, to base a
story on such experiences would, of course, avoid the dangers of
direct autobiography, but your man of action is less likely to have the
creative power of the novelist than the ability to write a simple

321

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

chronological record of his own life. Marryat is a very exceptional
case. Your typical man of action, too, is suspicious of all writing.
It is an art, a thing less stable than sport or trade or adventure, and
artists are apt to be “a rum lot.”

There is, too, the natural hesitation every human has to own that
he is attempting something out of the ordinary that he is not sure
he can master. Dunsany has told us that when he began to write
he did not dare allow his fellow officers to know that he was busy
with anything artistic. Conrad himself concealed from the young
mate of the Adowa that his scribbling was an attempt at a novel.
Stevenson felt his writing to be now a childish playing with paper
and now a something much worse, a prostitution of himself, a selling
of his soul for the pleasure of readers. The refuge that Scott
sought in anonymity has been noted again and again.

Conrad cannot explain what set him writing. He was about
thirty-two when, in 1889, he began Almayer’s Folly. He had then
spoken English for only a little more than ten years and he had
written nothing more ambitious than letters. He had been a great
reader from youngest childhood and he had seen his father busied
with writing, translations into Polish of Shakespeare and Hugo.
There was a great deal of leisure on sailing ships, especially on the
long trips to India, Malaya and Australia. Reading could not fill all
the spare time, or thinking, or talking things over. He must have
come to realize, too, that his experience in Malaya was unique among
cultivated men. First on the steamship Vidar and later on the bark
Otago he visited many out of the way places in Borneo and Celebes,
in Sumatra and Java, and farther east, even to Australia. Up a
Bornean river he met the man who became the original of Almayer.
That man, he tells us in A Personal Record (1912), haunted him,
and it seems there was no way to lay his ghost but by putting him
into a book. For five years in a desultory fashion he worked upon it
but perhaps had never finished it had not an illness contracted on the
Congo in 1892 made him consider leaving the sea. He was in the
sailing ship Torrens in these last years, 1893 and 1894. In the latter
year Almayer s Folly was finished, sent to the publisher and accepted.
It appeared in 1895 and though its success was but one of estimation,
and not of great sales, Conrad was encouraged to give up his sea
life and to settle down to that of a man of letters.

There was a new quality in Almayer’s Folly. It was the revela-

322

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

tion of a new personality, a personality that almost miraculously got
itself expressed in its possessor’s first attempt at writing. This
personality colored the descriptions of the clearing on the Bornean
river that is the scene of the story, and all its menacing environment.
It colored, too, the telling of the story and the presentation of char¬
acter. There is no writing anywhere more thoroughly saturated with
the personality of the writer than Conrad’s. No matter how objective
a story may appear to be Conrad is always there controlling its
development and inhibiting the action of its people. This control and
this inhibition are not directly revealed, for he creates a world of
their own for the characters to inhabit, and having created that world
for them he does not interfere with them. The control and inhibition
are in the world he creates for them. In the Malayan stories this
world is made out of an East that breaks the spirit of white men ;
that holds them down; that prevents them from rising superior to
failure ; that breeds fatalism in them and submission and resignation.

There is so much talk about “the new psychology’’ of Conrad that
one must for the truth’s sake stress the fact that the writings that
made him famous are first and foremost and most largely the out¬
growth of the environment of Malaya, a section of the East seen
through a temperament. They are, too, studies in the psychology
of strange people, done in a discipleship to Henry James, as well as
in subjection to Conrad’s own Slavic detachment and sense of illu¬
sion. The appeal of these Eastern stories, early and late, is basically
the appeal of strange places at the world’s end. Let them one after
another rise before your mind’s eye: Almayer’s Folly (1895), An
Outcast of the Islands (1896), “Karain” (1898), “The Lagoon”
(1898), Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), “The End of the Tether”
(1902), Typhoon (1903), Falk (1903), “The Secret Sharer”
(1912), “Freya of the Seven Isles” (1912), Victory (1915),
“Because of the Dollars” (1916), The Shadow Line (1917), The
Rescue (1920). There is vivid reality in each one of them, but the
tranced abandon with which you read them arises from the romance
of strange places in which they are steeped.

There is brooding back of them as well as romance about them.
All but always there is a sense of disaster to come. There can be
such an assertion of the power of young manhood over all difficulties
as that of Youth, and such a triumph of faithfulness and courage
over wild tempest as that of Typhoon. Yet the brooding in almost

323

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

all the other stories is of the nature of a menace. This Malaya is
not God’s country to white men, no matter what its lure for them ;
it has always something sinister, malign and threatening about it.
It breaks, as I have said, the men of the stories, or it completes the
ruin of those who have sought its backwaters as a refuge in their
weakness or their criminality. Almayer and Willems, of the two
earliest stories, are broken men; Lord Jim is another, whose final
triumph is but that of death; broken, too, are Jasper Allen of “Freya
of the Seven Isles,” and Heyst of Victory, and Davidson of “Be¬
cause of the Dollars”; and in the end, too, even Rajah Tom of
The Rescue goes down to defeat.

The constant elements, then, in all these stories of the East, are
the triumph of the East over the white men ; the spell of the lustrous
and serene waters of shallow seas under sunlit or starlit skies ; the
jungle hours so breathless, or so terrible in storm ; the brown men so
quiet in the background, so faithful and so faithless, so inscrutable
always. As you recall Conrad’s East you forget sudden blows and
thunderstorms, the noise of waves and wind, the cries of angered
men, the shots and rushes of the murders and the fighting. A strange
hush is over all, a hush broken only by whispering sounds of wind
and human speech, a hush and, often too, a darkness, — the darkness
of approaching storm or of night.

The stories that reveal these broken men, that chronicle their
vehemence and their resignation, are full of incidents. Thieving and
robbery and malignant feuds ; murder attempted or done for pas¬
sion’s sake or out of jealousy or greed ; shipwreck and piracy and
petty wars all have place in them. Yet so indirect, often, are their
methods of presentation, so involved the telling of the stories, so
much more interested their author in the effect of incident on char¬
acter and personality and temperament than in incident itself, that
the tragedy is often veiled, rendered remote, held in the background,
minimized.

As you read Conrad this subjection of incident, this aloofness of
presentation of character, this avoidance of poignancy, seem delib¬
erate on his part, the result of a studied detachment like that of Greek
tragedy.

And yet, from his writing about his art, they would not seem
deliberate or studied. The purpose of his art, Conrad tells us in the
“Author’s Note” to The Nigger of the Narcissus ( The New Review,

324 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

November, 1897), is “to snatch . . . from the remorseless rush of
time a passing phase of life ’ and to hold the rescued fragment
before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood.” Conrad may
intend to hold his stories thus before “all eyes,” but if he does he
often so stands that his shadow falls across them. “My task,” he
writes, “which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is before all, to make
you see.” The reader always does “see” the story, but there is that
trouble of the shadow to which I have just referred. In that shadow,
too often present, you can “see” but “as through a glass, darkly.”

The earlier stories are easier to follow, to understand in detail,
than such later ones as Chance (1913)* The Shadow Line (i9i7)>
and The Rescue (1920). And yet Chance, ironically, was the book
that brought Conrad his first general recognition. It was not, cer¬
tainly, that the difficulties of following the action of the story and
the motives of its characters made Chance the success it was, but that,
book by book, from AlmaycFs Folly on, more and more readers were
coming under the fascination of his art, and by the time that Chance
came along there were enough of them to give a story by Conrad a
large welcome. The acceptance by Henley in 1897 of The Nigger
of the Narcissus for The New Review was in itself a recognition
that a new author of power had arrived, and the reception that tale
was accorded by many writers left no doubt of the belief in him by
his fellow-craftsmen.

AlmayeR s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands could not be
popular for there were no likeable characters among the principals
of either. A new note struck in literature, the revelation of a world
unknown before, and true tragedy, will not in themselves ensure
popularity. Nor could The Nigger of the Narcissus make a wide
appeal before its author was known and liked for more companion¬
able writing, and time given for that special audience that delights
m books of the sea to find its way to it. It is an austere book, this
story of a ship s struggle with the sea on a voyage from India to
England. There are seascapes in it such as neither English literature
nor English painting before its day could boast, of the sea at rest
and under the wildest storm, but what story there is to it is of seamen
who are most of them repellent characters, and there is no flutter
of a petticoat in it from beginning to end.

Conrad has never written better than in this third book of his,

325

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

The Nigger of the ATarcissus. With it he leaped suddenly into full
power. There are struggles with a language incompletely mastered
here and there in Almayer’s Folly, and An Outcast of the Islands
has its passages of experimental and uncertain writing. Conrad at¬
tempts in Aissa, the half-caste Arab heroine of the latter book, to
delineate a splendid savage. He lavishes all his art upon her, but
she is too much for his powers as then developed and we cannot
clearly visualize her. It would seem that he had gone to Meredith
as model for his attempts to render certain moods of her. Has this
not the familiar ring: “In the sombre beauty of her face that smile
was like a gleam of dawn on a stormy morning; like the first ray of
Eastern light that darts evanescent and pale through the gloomy
clouds, the forerunner of sunrise and of thunder” ?

If Conrad were ever under the influence of Meredith he passed
quickly out of it. If there is a master he long followed it is Henry
James. We would know of this by internal evidence even if Conrad
had not told us that in 1905 he had “some twenty years of attentive
acquaintance with Mr. Henry James’s work.” We would know it
because the analysis of character and the psychology of his writing
bear resemblances to like methods in James, because he, too, like
James, believes and reveals his belief that there is a triumph in
renunciation, and because he, too, like James, refuses to round off
his stories at the end. You can say of Conrad as he says of James,
“His books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with a sense
of the life still going on.”

In A Personal Record, Conrad tells us that he read Scott and
Dickens and Thackeray in Polish, but Trollope only after he learned
English. There is no sign of the influence of any one of these men
in his writing. In Notes on Life and Letters (1921) he owns obli¬
gations to Marryat and to the sea-stories of Cooper, but it is difficult
to find for what unless for a hint or two of method in the descriptions
of the sea in Cooper. Anatole France Conrad often refers to with
admiration, but there is as little sign of his influence as there is of
that of Dickens, to whom Conrad refers with equal admiration.
“The Idiots” reveals an influence of Maupassant, just as another
short-story of that same Tales of Unrest (1898), “The Return,” the
influence of Henry James. The influence of no French novelist,
however, seems more than passing in Conrad, not even that of
Flaubert, whose books went to sea with him for many years.

326 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

For Turgenieff Conrad expresses more regard than for any other
novelist, but unless it is in his practice of trying to make beautiful
what he writes there is not much sign of influence of the elder Slav
on the younger. One looks for such influence in Conrad’s one novel
of Russian life, Under Western Eyes (1911), and, looking for it, one
confesses oneself not ingenious unless one finds it. As I read Under
Western Eyes I remember Smoke (1867), but only because, I think,
of certain likenesses of material. The influence of Dostoieffsky that
Walpole discovers in Joseph Conrad (1916) I cannot find at all.
Conrad’s references to Dostoieffsky are not complimentary. He sees
him as “the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoieffsky. ’

Tales of Unrest (1898) did little for the reputation of Conrad,
but Lord Jim (1900) appreciably widened his circle of readers. This
was, perhaps, because there is something of one who would be a hero
in nearly every man. Poor Jim, after waiting, boy and man, for
years for his chance, failed when the chance finally came. It was at
night, in a steamer that was a shell of rust, in the Indian Ocean. The
Patna scraped a submerged derelict and her officers, in a panic, got
away in a boat. Jim knew his moment for heroism had come, but he,
too, jumped to safety, leaving the shipload of pilgrims Mecca-bound
to their fate. The Patna was towed in by a French warship and the
Patna’s officers lost their papers. Jim, after some years of very
humble employment, went to Malaya and became a chief in a little
way. He died in a petty war, regaining his self-esteem in the fight
that cost him his life.

Lord Jim is a universal character. No state of civilization is too
high to produce such, no state of barbarism too low. This univer¬
sality may explain why the story appealed more than the earlier books,
and yet it is a story of a man whose manhood failed him in a crisis.
It may be his rehabilitation later, at least in his own estimation, that
was liked. It may be he was regarded as a “comeback.” If so, we
can understand the book’s appeal. So little in life regains its old
status after a lapse or decline that we are all delighted with the rare
spectacle of such returns that fate affords. Lord Jim is not simply
told. The shifts in time from one part of the book to another are
not always easy to follow. It is hard not to note again, as was noted
of Chance, the part the irony of fate plays in the appreciation of
Conrad. With unheroic hero and an involved telling Lord Jim makes

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD 327

more friends than the finely accomplished Nigger of the Narcissus.
Yet the very real power of the story must not be forgotten. Jim’s
recital of the funk of the officers of the Patna is as dramatic as
anything in Conrad.

The Inheritors (1901), written in collaboration with Ford Madox
Hueffer, has little of Conrad in it. It is concerned with a race of
supermen without morals who acquire control of the earth by power
exerted through a kind of new dimension in space. Romance (1904)
by the same two collaborators is a book of more consequence. Con¬
rad had, evidently, more to do with it, especially with the Cuban
scenes. It has not, however, the unity of effect invariable in the true
Conrad, and it can in no way be regarded as of his world.

Youth (1902) is Conrad’s most praised story. It is really hardly
a story, this account of tempest and fire at sea, and of long days in
a boat, and of the surprise of waking in an Eastern port. There is
little characterization in it, but a keen and complete presentation of
the joy of youth triumphing over all difficulties and misfortunes.
The account of the initial troubles in getting the old tub off to the
East is sober enough, but once Conrad gets his ship in Malayan
waters his heart lifts and sings in passage on passage of lyric ecstasy.
Conrad is, of course, recalling his own first voyage to Bangkok, a
voyage that somehow meant so much more to him than earlier voy¬
ages to Australia. Why, who shall say, except that Conrad was
destined to find in Malaya that juncture of time of life with place
that brought him, for the while, all that he asked. “I have seen,” he
cries, “its secret places and looked into its very soul. . . . The mys¬
terious East, . . . perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like
a grave. . . . The East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mys¬
terious, resplendent and sombre, living and unchanged, full of danger
and promise.”

Falk (1903) has an Eastern setting, Bangkok again, but the hap¬
penings that had made its dour Scandinavian hero a haunted man
occurred in “frore Arctic seas.” In the drift of a dismasted ship
for long weeks the survivors came to the end of their food, and then
fought it out. After Falk had been driven to eat the flesh of a man
he had killed he was rescued, he and three others. He could never
forget his cannibalism ; it seemed to him an unpardonable sin. And
yet the experience had in a way refined him, made him more of a

328 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

thinking man than he otherwise could have been, and raised his
mating, as that of a fated man, to something more than a mere
mating. It is a story that will not out of mind.

It was nine years after Falk, in 1912, that Conrad published his
next book with the East in it, ’Twixt Land and Sea. Two of its
tales, “The Secret Sharer” and “Freya of the Seven Isles,” take us
back to Malaya again. “The Secret Sharer” has for scene the Gulf
of Siam, and “Freya of the Seven Isles” waters patrolled by a Dutch
gunboat just off Java. “The Secret Sharer” has a strange eeriness
about it, a literally whispering quality that before Conrad we find
most nearly approximated in Maeterlinck. “Freya of the Seven
Isles” is the very reverse of “The Secret Sharer,” as loud as the other
is subdued. Victory with its several murders has no such tumult in
it as this story. It could readily have been written as a long novel.
The many episodes, the four clearly defined principals, warrant such
a treatment. Freya, crashing out Wagner on her rosewood piano;
her old Danish father, of a wild past but now timorous toward the
Dutch authorities ; Jasper Allen of the rakish brig Bonito; and Lieu¬
tenant Heemskirk, too rascally a villain to work such tragic woe as
he does — where in English fiction will you find such another four?
Each one is realized ; each one comes into the story out of a past fully
lived ; none exist, you feel, just for the purposes of this story.

A short-story, “Because of the Dollars” (1916) ; a one-man story
of a ship’s voyage, The Shadow Line (1917) ; and two full-scope
novels, Victory (1915) and The Rescue (1920), complete Conrad’s
presentation of life in Malaya. In two of these stories, “Because of
the Dollars” and Victory , there are characters that seem almost
“lifted” from Bret Harte. It is well known, of course, that Kipling
owns methods in his stories are derived from Harte. It is curious
to see England’s other great revealer of Far Eastern life turning to
the same master. Laughing Anne and Plain Mr. Jones and Ricardo
are just the sort we have met in Roaring Camp and Poker Flats.

The Slwdow Line (1917) has many analogies with Youth, It is
a subtler study of a period in life more difficult to present and less
attracti\e when presented, the passing of youth into full manhood,
maturity, that time of life in which responsibility must mean more
than adventure. It is a story of a voyage, like Youth and Typhoon ,
a drifting, bemused sort of thing that reminds you slightly of “The
Ancient Mariner, just as The Brute’ (1908), reminds you of “The

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD 329

Wanderer” (1913) of Masefield. In “The Brute,” as in The Nigger
of the Narcissus, it is the ship that is the protagonist, rather than the
ship’s captain, as in Typhoon and The Shadow Line.

There is less that is difficult to get hold of in Victory (1915) than
in any other novel of Conrad. The characters are easier to under¬
stand, or perhaps one should say, understood more easily, because
more completely explained by the author than is his habit. Two of
them are very Northern, Alma the English girl of the “ladies’
orchestra,” and Heyst, the son of the Swedish philosopher who had
been brought up by his father to be suspicious of all emotion. Of
the effect of Alma’s eyes on Heyst, Conrad says. “Something wild in
their grey stare made him think of seabirds in the cold murkiness of
high latitudes.” And Heyst, with his light blue eyes and “red-gold
pair of horizontal mustaches” always suggests Viking ancestry, de¬
spite his gentle air of abstraction which had won him the name of
“Enchanted Heyst.”

You are more concerned with the fate of the lovers in Victory
than you usually are in Conrad. His way of removing you as far
as possible from the story, by having it told by Captain Marlow, or
by some other intermediary, destroys the intimacy of interest an
immediate telling fosters. It may be that Conrad believes that by
his device of having the story told by some one who was on the spot
when things happened, he is attaining a greater vividness and inti¬
macy. If he so believes he deceives himself. I do not think, how¬
ever, he so believes, that such is the reason for the device. Conrad
is a devotee to quiet methods. He does not like too direct an attack
in story-telling. He would avoid all approach to what in story-telling
is like loud tones in talking. As a result he often tells his story
almost out of hearing. We have to strain to catch everything. Some¬
times, too, his method results in a feeling by the reader that the
characters are moving not like people in life but as people in a kind
of dream, as if they are held rigid in their strange atmosphere like
images frozen into a sort of hypnosis and are to be wakened to action
only when their creator waves over them his magician’s wand. There
is no one story in which the characters seem in such a half-trance
throughout, but there are places in Lord Jim and “Tomorrow” and
Chance and “The Planter of Malata” that suggest such explanation
of action or lack of action on the part of the characters.

Another explanation of the aloofness of some of Conrad’s charac-

330

SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

ters may be that they are at times reduced to their dominant emotion,
that that dominant emotion alone is emphasized, and that we thus
lose sight of the character and personality of the man or woman in
his or her overpowering emotion. That is, I think, why Captain
Lingard is at times inexplicable and unrealizable in The Rescue.

In Victory, however, though Heyst is a strange man, we never
lose our hold on him, never fail to understand him. That Alma
should come in the end to pass beyond the regard of gratitude and
to love him is made believable. The finale is high tragedy, despite
the touch of melodrama that always pursues Plain Mr. Jones and
Martin Ricardo and the alligator hunter. The death of Alma is a
great moment, like the death of Tristram; and Heyst, like Iseult,
does not live long after. There is, however, no Liebestod. Instead
there is the ironic note in the mien of the Chinese servant of Heyst.
Now that all five of these troubling outlanders are dead he can
practice his ruling passion, the cultivation of vegetables.

The Rescue was announced as almost ready for publication in
1898. It was published in 1920. Was the reason for the long delay
in its completion the attempt to put before us so we could understand
them its host of characters and to clarify the confused incidents of
the story so we could follow what was happening? Whatever the
reason for the delay the story as we now have it is one worth waiting
for. There are five full-length portraits of memorable people in it.
Captain Lingard, an Elizabethan searover reincarnated in the nine¬
teenth century, is the central figure. We met him, earlier in Conrad
but later in life, in AlmayeVs Folly and An Outcast of the Islands.
In The Rescue he is thirty-five, blond, bearded, ironhanded, brave
to a fault.

The story is of his “sacrifice of his passion to his Gods,” of his
giving up of Edith Travers, because she has lost him his honor, in
one reading of the ending ; because his broken pride is too portentous
a thing to him to be assuaged by any woman’s love, in another reading
of it. Edith Travers is another character of as heroic mould, but,
somehow, unsympathetic. We are glad she does not elope with’ Lin¬
gard, and not for convention’s sake, or morality’s, or her own sake
either. Had Lingard taken her with him at the story’s close her love
would have lasted but a little while. The loves of ladies for their
serving men burn out quickly, and though her love for him had a
little more dignity than some such loves, it was hardly more than that

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD 331

which is proverbial in such affairs. Her sense that she should give
herself to him in payment for what he had done for her and hers
has its ironic side, but if she had gone with him for that reason it
would have become an intolerable grievance in the end.

Jorgenson is the third “figure against the sky.” He is a Nor¬
wegian who seems to have withered away into a mummy of a man,
but who can still think of Tromsoe and that he will never see snow
again. He is dragged out of his death in life in the Malay quarter
of Singapore by Lingard and plays a man’s part and dies a man’s
death for the Rajah Laut who trusted him. Travers is the owner
of the yacht that, stranded off the Coast of Refuge, is the cause of
all Lingard’s trouble. He is a little “big man,” yachting now that
a change of government has thrown him out of office in England.
D’Alcacer, a Spaniard with the quietude of his caste, is the sympa¬
thetic onlooker you meet now and then in Conrad as in life. These
are the five characters that stand out. Perhaps you should add to
them Jaffir, the bearer of the ring of ill omen, the tireless swimmer,
the faithful to death — the Malay at his best.

Hassim and Immada are the Malays of rank whom Lingard is
bound to restore to their country in Celebes. They have been
driven from the rule of their corner of the world and for months
now Lingard has had no other life but his preparations for their
restoration. Edith Travers comes between him and “the work of
his hand” and for the moment between him and “the hope of his
heart.” She brings into his life a kind of love not only unexperi¬
enced by him but unheard of and unimagined.

Plottings and counter-plottings of Malays and half caste Arabs fill
the background of The Rescue. It is a very vivid book, crowded
with incidents and characters. Some scenes of it are among one’s
memories that cannot fade. Such a one is that in which Edith
Travers walks alone, clad in white and with a torch held above her
head, from beach to stockade, while from the environing darkness
hundreds of savage eyes gaze at her menacingly.

And yet The Rescue is not one of the great books of Conrad. In¬
deed it is hardly too much to say that none of the books of Malaya,
except Victory in part, are as great as Nostromo (1904) and Under
Western Eyes (1911) and The Arrow of Gold (1918). All three
of these reach back into experiences that came to him before he knew
the East. Such people as you meet in Nostromo are, of course,

332 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

inhabitants of a world of his own imagining but they can be^ traced
back to originals he met in his youth in Marseilles and in Spanish
America. Under Western Eyes finds its inspiration in memories of
his boyhood in Poland and Vologda and in the Ukraine, and of a
visit home in later years. The Arrow of Gold is a product of those
days of his youth on the Mediterranean.

There have been few novels since Scott in which romance and
realism are at one so wholly and so greatly as in Nostromo. It is
crowded with action, with story on story, almost too crowded for
joy in reading. There is the story of the San Tome mine and how
it grew to be dearer to Charles Gould than his wife. There is the
story of the Captain of Cargadores, Nostromo himself, of his wor¬
ship of himself unappeased, and the love of him by the two daugh¬
ters of the old Garibaldino, Linda and Giselle. There is the story
of Martin Decoud and his awakened patriotism and his Antonia.
Here are three main stories, and there are a number of others of
lesser importance.

And the characters ! There are as many, almost, as in Meredith’s
Vittoria (1867). They are better kept in hand, too, perhaps because
the scene of action is restricted almost solely to one place, the port
of Sulaco. Unless you read slowly, however, unless you reread, you
will be confused at times.

Under Western Eyes (1911) is written with more unrestraint than
any other novel except The Secret Agent (1907). A Pole writing
of Russia, a conservative writing of anarchists, is tempted to break
through even a temperamental and long-studied reserve. Conrad
had been in banishment with his father in Vologda and his childhood
was filled with stories of the tyranny of the Czarist regime. He was,
naturally, strongly anti-Russian, but he was, through the circum¬
stances of his life as well as by temperament, strongly anti-anarchist.
A sea captain must be a tyrant at times. A ship can no more be run
by a committee than can an orchestra. So Conrad sympathizes with
a strongly centralized authority. Inevitably, then, his emotions are
mixed when he writes about Russia.

In Under Western Eyes, Razumov, the hero of the story, is a
conformist by nature. He wishes only to be let alone so he may
work out his own individual career. With that irony so omnipresent
in Conrad, Razumov is involved by chance and against his will with
the Revolutionists. His only way out seems to be to become a spy

333

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

in the employ of the government; and this is no way out. The end
is, of course, that he is crushed between the upper and nether mill¬
stones. Though Conrad has disclaimed the right to speak with au¬
thority on Russia, there is a very clear reading of Russia in Under
Western Eyes. It is a monster to him, this old Russia of the Czars,
at once cynical, mystic and childlike, with resignation as “what’s
divine” in its soul, and promising, it may be, some kind of an evangel
to the Western World. The creed of its revolutionists is expressed
very clearly through the lips of Sophia Antonovna: “Fife not to be
vile must be a revolt — a pitiless protest — all the time.” Conrad has
only understanding of that creed ; there is no sympathy with it in him
anywhere.

Four years before Under Western Eyes, in The Secret Agent,
in 1911, Conrad had paid his respects to the revolutionists, owning
what was noble in their attitude, pointing out clearly what was base.
Writing of Mr. Yerloc, a secret agent in London, who pretended to
be a revolutionist, he said : “The instinct of conventional respecta¬
bility was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of
all kinds of recognized labor — a temperamental defect which he
shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given
social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advan¬
tages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which
must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-
restraint, and toil. These are the enemies of discipline and fatigue
mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price
exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worry¬
ing, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics.
The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by this way
of vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion
of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.”

The Arrow of Gold ( 1918) has not so large a canvas as X ostromo,
it is not so ambitious in intention, but all the parts of the story are
harmonized as the so many differing parts in Xostromo could not be.
The characters of The Arrow of Gold have an impressive reality.
You may like few of them, but none of them can be denied any more
than people you have known for years. T hen there is Doha Rita !
Years before Conrad wrote The Arrow of Gold he had sketched out
the story from originals met in Marseilles, but he wandered away
from it in his interest in a boat’s run and wreck off the Spanish coast.

334 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

“The ‘Tremolino’ ” will be found in The Mirror of the Sea (1906).
Already in this sketch Blunt is clearly indicated as “Poor J. M. K. B.,
Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme ,” but no other characters save
the sailing master of the filibusterer are of anything like the pro¬
portions of their development in The Arrow of Gold. Dona Rita
in “The ‘Tremolino’ ” is but the outline of Doha Rita in The Arrow
of Gold. She is already of high heart “with something of a lioness
in the expression of her courageous face,” but without the dignity of
the later portrait, and with nothing about her of “the women of all
time” she suggests in The Arrow of Gold.

There may be differences of opinion about the artistic ethics of
changing characters that have once been given to the world. This
man may argue that if a character is real to its creator it cannot be
changed. If Conrad needs any defense for the development of “The
‘Tremolino’ ” into The Arrow of Gold, it can be said that he has not
changed any of the characters but simply completed them. It might
be argued that Dona Rita was much less consequential in the earlier
version. That is true. We know, however, that the Dona Rita of
The Arrow of Gold had been a plaything in her youth and had
needed the “volatile little soul of a sparrow” to meet the conditions
of her life. As we find her in The Arrow of Gold she is a woman
in her fullness of bloom, gracious and of perfect poise. We see her
knowing love for the first time, but putting it aside after the briefest
while because it may ruin the career of her lover, or because — per¬
haps — it may not last. After their idyll and his wounding in a duel
and her nursing of him back to health, M. Georg is deserted by her.
Is her reason that she could not endure, like Deirdre, to be “keeping
a watch on a love had no match and it wasting away ?” I have
called upon words of Synge to explain the flight of Dona Rita.
That you can explain her only in such noble numbers is a tribute
to the power of Conrad.

Put Dona Rita among all the great women of epic and romance
and drama and novel as you conjure them up in memory back to
Helen of Troy, and she will hold her own in that company. She is,
in the great phrase of Yeats, “a woman Homer sung.” Think of
Iseult, and of Brynhild of The Volsunga Saga, of Cleopatra as we
know her in Shakespeare, of Mary Stuart as we know her in Swin¬
burne, of Turgemeff’s Helene and of Meredith’s Emilia. See Dona
Rita side by side with them, a woman who had in her something of

335

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

“the women of all time.” Hear her creator’s praise of her : “The
delicate carnation of her face, which, after the first glance given to
the whole person, drew irresistibly one’s gaze to itself by an indefin¬
able quality of charm beyond all analysis and made you think of
remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculp¬
tured on immemorial monuments and of those lying unsung in their
tombs. While she moved downwards from step to step with slightly
lowered eyes there flashed upon me suddenly the recollection of words
heard at night, of Allegre’s words about her, of there being in her
‘something of the women of all time.’ ”

There are other more intimate descriptions, but this must suffice
to prove that here is another English writer to draw women as do
our Shakespeare and our Meredith. There can be no such gallery
of portraits of ladies gathered from Conrad as from either of these
masters, but Dona Rita is by no means an isolated revelation of this
power of Conrad. Aissa, the splendid savage, I have referred to,
and Edith Travers, as coldly beautiful and as Amazonian as Bryn-
hild, but Alice Jacobus, the cloistered girl of the scented garden of
Mauritius, in “A Smile of Fortune” (1912), seems to me his most
memorable portrait of a woman after Dona Rita. Alice sits there,
on the verandah, shunned, sullen, and brooding, as much out of the
world as if she were in the convent she looks to as a refuge. She is
mysterious, inscrutable, provocative, a spoiled child at heart, a splen¬
did woman in body, lithe, pardlike, unawakened. Her knight finds
her, but when his kindness has broken through her reserve, her
charm for him has fled, and he leaves her there above the scented
garden lonelier than he found her, with her old ennui to face and
memories of him to forget. Very different, but equally admirable in
art, are his portraits of women without charm, like Winnie Verloc
of The Secret Agent, who knew that “life did not stand looking into
very much,” and Mrs. Fyne of Chance, hardheaded, unimaginative
and dull, though a poet’s daughter.

It is the sea, trade by sea, that has brought Conrad into touch
with most of the people he writes about, so, inevitably, his world is
chiefly a man’s world. It is of men, then, that we have the largest
number of portraits, and a proportion of them naturally are sailors
or ex-sailors. Nostromo stands out among these last. You think
of him as the most vivid of Conrad’s men, a portrait a little theatrical,
but that in subject as well as in presentation. He is not so fresh

336 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

a creation, perhaps, as Heyst, or so heroic in mould as Lingard, but
he has a way of coming into mind when you think of Conrad’s men
just as Doha Rita has when you think of Conrad’s women.

Nostromo had been a sailor before he had settled down in Sulaco.
Had he remained a sailor he would not have deviated from the
faithfulness that had developed in him from his years of service at
sea. Conrad has depicted sailors who are a poor sort, like Donkin
and Martin Ricardo, but most of them he presents are men of that
courage and steadfastness and fidelity to the tradition and discipline
of the ship that he believes are characteristic of the majority of
sailors. It is the ship, he reiterates, not the sea, that sailors love
and stand by. The sea is insensate and unstable and treacherous.
It cannot command the attachment that, traditionally, and in daily
proof, men have to the ship.

It was leaving the ship that undid Nostromo. The land found
out the weaknesses in him. For years he had been flattered and
heartened by the trust men professed in him. When a hard job
promised in that part of the Placid Gulf it was Nostromo who was
thought of by everybody as the one man to perform it, who was told,
when it was entrusted to him, that only he could do it. Gradually
he came to realize that he wanted money and the power money brings
as well at flattery and trust and good report and reputation. These
latter, he now felt, were all very well ; he liked the distinction they
brought him, but he saw others, lesser men than his magnificent self,
with money and power. Why should not he, the incomparable
Nostromo, have these so good things as well as the honors that had
come to him? Plad he remained at sea he would not have had the
spectacle of the powerful and rich so constantly before him, and he
would have escaped the corruption that envy engendered in him. It
was because he wanted money and power and because he felt that
he had been wronged by the withholding of these from him that he
stole the silver of the San Tome mine when it was entrusted to him
to remove to a place of safety in the revolution.

There is no doubt about the universality of such a character.
There is in each one of us that self-esteem, bridled though it may
be, that was the moral undoing of Nostromo. We can all understand
him and some of us may have, secretly, sympathy with his attitude
And yet perhaps but few of us. Self-esteem often hardens its pos¬
sessor to consideration for self-esteem in others. What is right for

337

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

me, we own to ourselves in the back of our minds, is only right for
me because I am I. It would not be right for others. So we are
troubled, perhaps, by Nostromo. He helps us to find ourselves out,
and that is an unhappy experience.

How solid Nostromo is, how splendid on his silver-gray horse,
with those black whiskers so rakish and those white teeth flashed so
efficaciously ! And yet there is, so far as I can recall, no minute
description of him, no mention as to whether his skin is light or dark.
Most Mediterranean sailors are dark, but we have known Genoese
as fair as Finns. We visualize him as dark, with menacing eyes, but
we do that of ourselves. The splendor of his allure is set forth by
Conrad, the silver cord on his sombrero and the silver buttons on his
leather jacket, but not the expression of his face. That I have a sense
of, but not from memories of my reading of him, but from this
visualization the drawing of his character has forced me to make for
myself. That is one secret of the magic of Conrad. He reveals to
you so minutely the character and motives and emotions of his people
that they are conjured up before you without mention by him of
the details of appearance.

There are thirty-odd characters in Conrad that provoke comment
as does Nostromo ; that you want to talk over with your friends who
have read the stories ; that set your thoughts roving far afield ; but
such analysis of others must be foregone. They ought, however, to
be listed, for they have place, many of them on the line, in the great
portrait gallery of English fiction. There are Almayer and Willems,
from the first two books ; and Donkin and Wait and Singleton from
The Nigger of the Narcissus; and Lord Jim ; and Kurtz from “The
Heart of Darkness,” that perfect thing of horrors; and Whalley and
Mac Whirr and Falk, three so differing seamen; and Verloc and
Comrade Ossipon and Razumov and Haldin, anarchists and haters
of anarchists ; and Gasper Ruiz, the giant peasant of the Andes ;
and that fantastic couple of officers of The Duel, D’Hubert and
Ferraud, created by Conrad in a rare mood of humor ; and Jasper
Allen and Old Neilson and Heemskirk of “Freya of the Seven
Isles”; and Heyst and Schomberg of Victory; and Blunt and Mills
and Ortega and Dominic and M. Georg of The Arrow of Gold ; and
Lingard and Travers and D’Alcacer and Jorgenson of The Rescue;
and another thirty-odd you might name. In this list there are none
of the brown men or Arabs. A mere westerner knows so little of

338 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

these races that it is hard for him to tell whether Conrad s portraits
of them are true or not. He has met them of course in many books
since in boyhood he stood with Robinson Crusoe and saw the foot¬
prints on the sand. Melville has them, and Stevenson and Louis
Becke and Sir Hugh Clifford, and all the many to-day who are of
the Pacific cult ; but such portraits do not help much in the absence
of first-hand knowledge. All one who does not know the East can
say is that this character is made credible and that is not. Conrad
has given us many differing sorts of them: Babalatchi, whose talk
lets us into certain secrets of the Malay mind ; and Karain, whom the
furies pursued; and Jaffir, as true to his chief as any Highlander to
the head of his clan; and Hassim and Tengga and Daman and Bel-
arab, good men and bad and indifferent, like those of other hues.

The brevity and pettiness and unimportance of human life are as
instant to some moods of every thinking man as, to other moods of
his, its gallantry and blessedness and inestimable worth. You will
find realizations of these latter qualities in Conrad, but he lived so
long in his most impressionable years with the immensities of sea and
sky always about him, and, when he was ashore so frequently among
burdened or broken men, that there are more records of littleness and
defeat than of largeness and triumph among his stories. Such a
result, too, is almost inevitable with one who, like Conrad, has the
tragic bias in the very fiber of him, and irony intertwisted with it.

If you could symbolize these stories by one figure it would be
that of a man alone on the deck of a sailing ship, at night, raised by
the heave of the sea in silhouette against the black and spangled back¬
ground of the sky. It would be “one of those dewy, starry nights,
oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of
the awful loneliness, of the hopeless, obscure insignificance of our
globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.”

In certain moods Conrad has a sense that all life is an illusion.
He has something of the dreaminess as well as of the resignation of
the Slav. Of the sailor, too, perhaps. At other moments he is as
matter-of-fact as any Yankee skipper that ever sailed out of Salem
in old days. Do not forget that when he was in command of the
Otago he was trader as well as master and that he made “the dear
old thing earn money as she had never done before.” In all his
phases Conrad hates disorder, carelessness, irresponsibility and noise.
“After all,” he writes in Notes on Life and Letters, “every sort of

339

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

shouting is a transitory thing. It is the grim silence of facts that
remains.” His creed is one of tradition, duty, order, seemliness,
courage, faith, responsibility. There is never a question of his being
on the side of the angels. In “Because of the Dollars,” he says,
“He’s thoroughly humane, and I don’t imagine there can be much of
any other sort of goodness that counts on this earth.”

Life is a good thing, he holds, whether it brings more of un¬
happiness or happiness. “Monsters do change, but the truth of
humanity goes on forever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the
variety of its disclosures.” That is from Notes on Life and Letters,
but it is in Victory that he makes his most forthright declaration of
faith in life. It is in the last words of Heyst, “Woe to the man
whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put
its trust in life.”

You will find sayings from Shakespeare and from Sir Thomas
Browne on the title pages of books of Conrad. Both he has taken
to heart. His infinite pity for men allies him, in this one way, with
Shakespeare, and his sombre magnificence of style, in that one way,
with Browne. It is exotic in origin, this style of Conrad, but it has
grown more and more English with the years. It was not for nothing
that he had, as Huneker tells us, the English Bible always at hand.
Conrad has striven, writing and re-writing, to attain to “the just
expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the
artist in words.” That ambition he has realized, a miracle for a man
born and grown to the verge of manhood in another tongue.

As his books stand now you have to make no allowances in judg-

- • mm

ing him for the fact that he was foreign-born. Years ago he realized
that “any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art,
should carry its justification in every line.” Every line of Conrad
carries “its justification.” The man is an artist to the finger-tips.

It is a marked and an ironical fact that Conrad the Slav came
to the front in English literature following other ideals of writing
than those of Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky in the very years when so
many English novelists were wandering after these strange gods.
Dostoieffsky led them astray by example and Tolstoi by precept.
The latter’s What Is Art ? (1898) has spread abroad more artistic
heresy than any literary tract ever written. In it Tolstoi, it should
be remembered, repudiated the great work of his own prime. Dos¬
toieffsky, a very great creator of character, a very confused story-

340 SCHELLING ANNIVERSARY PAPERS

teller, bad never the clear mind of the artist. His very great¬
heartedness and sympathy for suffering led him to a too curious
examination of aberrant and diseased characters. It is the old story
of dragging into the light what English civilization in its kindliness
would hide away, or at least not exploit as fit material for fiction.
Yet in their search for new effects, in their determination not to be
hypocritical, in their mad desire to indict the powers that be for all
that is as it should not be, some Georgian novelists tried to follow
the methods and to find the material of Dostoieffsky. If he made
heroes of epileptic and mad murderer need they hesitate to celebrate
anything? Less revolting was the glorification of crime in Victorian
fiction that provoked Thackeray to Catherine (1840) and Barry
Lyndon (1844). And all the while this feverish groping in the dark
was persisted in by English novelists, Conrad the Slav labored in
England at a new and beautiful art of fiction uninfluenced largely
by any Slav but Turgenieff. In the course of time this art stood
revealed to all men and certain of the truants turned to him as master.

Walpole, in his Joseph Conrad (1916), tells us that Conrad has
influenced “all the more interesting younger English novelists,” whom
he lists as Forster, Lawrence, Beresford, George, Swinnerton,
Cannan, Viola Meynell and Brett Young. Walpole himself is mani¬
festly one so influenced, to a greater degree indeed than several of
those he mentions, who are primarily disciples of Gissing. The
influence of Conrad is wider, however, than Walpole indicates. You
may instance those writers of the sea, MacFee and Tomlinson; and
Richard Curie. And that so different analyzer of moods, Virginia
Woolf. In America, too, followers are to be found. Hergesheimer
is one, and Eugene O’Neill another. In play on play of the latter's
the central motive is to be found in Conrad, and his atmosphere has
been carefully studied, and sometimes caught. The influence of Con¬
rad is sometimes confessed in places where it would not be expected,
as in The Congo” of Vachel Lindsay.- He says that poem could
not have been if it had not been for “The Heart of Darkness.” I do
not wish to labor the matter, but it would be easy to greatly extend
the list of writers who have felt his spell and taken to heart his
methods.

Such a tabulation of writers influenced may seem beside the mark.
Conrad is valuable for what he is and not for his influence on others.
Yet the influence is significant of the originality of the man. It

34i

THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

proves that he is one of the “beginnings” in fiction, like Fielding, like
Scott, like Hardy. Conrad has struck a new note in literature ; he
has introduced a quality into it that was not there before he wrote ;
he has created characters that are as memorable as those of any other
novelist ; he has told stories that cannot be forgotten ; he has revealed
to us more wonders than any writer of our generation ; he has
brought romance back to English fiction. To do these things is to
be great.

■ ;

Date Due

CAT. NO. 23 233 RENTED IN U.S

0235162

TRENT UNIVERSITY

PN36 .S3 1923

Schelling anniversary papers, by
his former students

DATE

)

,ssuilS0748

—

130748

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Schelling-anniversary papers"

See other formats